Chil Rajchman was one of only a handful to survive Treblinka. Unlike Auschwitz, Treblinka was purely an extermination camp, where the only Jews not immediately gassed were Sonderkommandos employed in ...

The publicity team at Frederick Forsyth’s publisher has done a good job of drumming up interest in his new memoir by focusing on the question of whether he was ever a member of the Secret Intelligence ...

‘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, ...

This is a great idea for a book, but imperfectly executed; witness the irritating use of a partially italicized title. Robert Poole’s uncontentious theme is that humankind’s (he prefers ‘man’s’) view ...

Readers aged over twenty-five will remember what it was like. The gruesome flared suits made from synthetic fibres. The Morris Marinas and Hillman Imps, cars which only started fifty per cent of the ...

DAVID PEACE BEGAN the first novel of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, about the Ripper killings and other grim goings-on in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s, with a quotation from Harry S Truman: ...

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in which he anticipated how we would spend our time a hundred years ahead. Keynes ...

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 ...

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 ...

This magazine’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award has never shied away from speaking truth to power as well as literary celebrity. Alastair Campbell is a two-time nominee and Tony Blair was touted for an ...

Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art. @StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at. ‘I ...