George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was “a man who lived a woman’s life”. This is how Lucy Hughes-Hallett introduces her richly multilayered, Life of the royal favourite who was only thirty-five ...

Four times elected governor of New York state from 1958 to 1970, Nelson Rockefeller spent much of each term seeking the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, to which be belonged, but which ...

Matthew Kadane disarmingly describes his new book as an “intellectual history of nobodies”. Its protagonist is the splendidly named Pentecost Barker, born in Plymouth in 1690, the son of devoutly ...

On September 10, after watching the ABC News debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I switched to X to judge the response. Not long ago I would have rolled my eyes at a post by the ...

Introducing his excellent anthology of Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets (1967), Auden properly addressed a problem of definition: what is a “minor poet”? Or, to ask the same question the other way round ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...