‘Quien es?’ The last words of William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, have obsessed many people. ‘Who is it?’ is a simple enough question to ask in a darkened room where you think a friend is sleeping, ...

All for the Thrill of the Chase - Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco by Tim Blanning ...

Penny for a Song - The Catchers by Xan Brooks ...

In 1962, Martin Heidegger went on a cruise to the Aegean. Going to Greece had not been an easy decision. Seven years earlier he had got so far as to buy train and boat tickets; when the enormity of ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

In 1611, the Somerset-born traveller Thomas Coryat described an Italian architectural novelty: a ‘very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building: the edge whereof ...

Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation by Danny Dorling; Exam Nation: Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

The most enigmatic and in some ways the most tragic victim of this process was Richard II. He is the central figure in Helen ...

God does not approve of street lighting, observed Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That wasn’t an oblique aphorism: it was simple biblical exposition. The God of Genesis is famously keen on maintaining ...

It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system ...

The new Duke of Buckingham now outranked every other nobleman in England. Moreover, his seemingly unassailable place in the ...