Ruth Brandon has set herself the unenviable task of sorting out the history of the Surrealists between 1917 and 1945, and trying to define what Surrealism meant at any given moment. The word first ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors. Peter ...

For two such different books, one by a single author concentrating on the future, the other a collection of many voices assessing and reminiscing about the past, there are unexpected points of contact ...

Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...

A Britain without the South Asian British is now almost unthinkable. With a few exceptions – farming, fishing and the armed forces spring to mind – there are few sectors of UK life where the ...

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of ...

The ultimate purpose of what is now only the second least reputable literary prize going is to render itself redundant by discouraging poorly written, gratuitous or unnecessary passages of sexual ...

Lustrum, the second volume of Robert Harris's trilogy following the life, career and political travails of Cicero, is a splendidly researched historical blockbuster of real human depth and political ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors. Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest ...

In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors. Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest ...