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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In 1989, when Thomas Heatherwick was eighteen years old, he picked up a Taschen book about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in a student book sale. Inside it, he saw a double-page spread showing ...

Tolerance does not come naturally to humankind. For most of recorded history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society or about the moral code was laid down by ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

Rose Tremain used to chafe against being called a historical novelist, a description that seemed to stick to her after the publication of her breakthrough novel, the Booker Prize-shortlisted ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity.

Butcher, Joyce Carol Oates’s sixty-forth novel, is ostensibly the story of Silas Weir, ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry’ to some, the ‘Red-Handed Butcher’ to others. A 19th-century doctor at the New Jersey ...