It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

As India powers its way up the world GDP rankings, a case is being made for recasting its national history as ‘world history’. By looking beyond India’s boundaries and focusing on the global context ...

The political thriller has been perhaps the most successful fictional genre of the past decade, as Frederick Forsyth’s bank manager would doubtless testify. Yet very few politicians have tried their ...

A hundred years ago to be one of a million Englishwomen was to be doomed. Even intelligent and educated girls could not get a post as a governess – there were too many. Hundreds of thousands resorted ...

Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000) is famed for his twenty ‘tales’ – as he called them – about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, one of the great pairs of ...

The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau (Translated from French by Jody Gladding) ...

Essays in Austrian Literature by W G Sebald (Translated from German by Jo Catling) ...

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 ...

If asked to name the most consequential global business figure of the last half-century, few would choose Masayoshi Son. The Japanese billionaire has not invented any transformative technology, like ...

For some time, Anglo-American historians have been obsessed with the G word. The word is not ‘God’ but ‘global’. Using it, we have learned to tell a self-comforting story. Until recently, we begin, we ...

It would be easy to assume that Hunting the Falcon, by historians John Guy and Julia Fox, is yet another addition to the huge number of biographies of Anne Boleyn and her husband, Henry VIII. But it ...

‘Inheritocracy’ is an ugly word to describe an increasingly important social and economic development: the passing of approximately £5.5 trillion in housing wealth from baby boomers, Britain’s first ...