The Lisbon earthquake is the most famous natural disaster in European history. In the space of little more than an hour on the morning of 1 November 1755, while much of the city’s population was at ...

ONE OF STALIN'S closest colleagues in the turbulent years of the dictatorship, Lazar Kaganovich, once remarked that he had known many Stalins. This does not mean that Stalin had doubles everywhere ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

The idea that all of us have a self – essential, irreducible and inherently valuable – is something that’s accepted across social divisions, party-political lines and ideological differences. The mere ...

Tariq Ali's new book, The Nehrus and the Gandhis, an Indian Dynasty, covers the lives of three successive generations of the same family, the history of India from the struggle for independence ...

‘Characters migrate.’ New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip takes this aphorism from Umberto Eco as its epigraph and it has multiple resonances in his novel. The thirteen-year-old narrator Matilda’s ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

Climate remains a focus of public debate whatever the distractions of credit crunches, wayward parliamentarians, or a general election. These two books look specifically at the impacts of climate ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

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 ...

There was a time, now long past, when English novelists, with E M Forster in the forefront, would write of cultivated, respectable spinsters seduced out of the emotional frigidity of their lives by ...