A Life of the Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer ...

THE SCOPE OF contemporary US dominance is unparalleled in human history. America has 752 military facilities in 130 countries, some of them until recently part of the Soviet empire. What the American ...

Richard Nixon was a bad man but an effective conservative – a conservative not in the ideological sense (cutting taxes, throwing bums off welfare) but in the sense of a statesman who tries to navigate ...

When Napoleon Bonaparte married Josephine on 9 March 1795 in a civil ceremony, the bride wore a plain white muslin gown. She added colour by sporting a red, white and blue tricolour sash on which was ...

Who was Charles de Gaulle? Stop the clock in 1939 and he was an eccentric army officer. Stop it in July 1940, after he had flown to London, and he was claiming to represent France against the Vichy ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

At the end of this massive, balanced and without doubt enduring biography of Thomas Cranmer the reader is still left wondering what he really believed. A small clue to his final theological position ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Dorling Kindersley, otherwise known as DK, was one of the greatest publishing phenomena of recent times. Springing up from nothing in a back bedroom in Kennington in 1974, it was the brainchild of ...

I’m going to start this review with an admission: I have next to no idea what this book is about. Not in a literal sense, obviously; there is a writer called Rachel Cusk, who used to be married and ...