Incredible but far from unusual is the story of Hercules’s maternal grandfather. Taken captive defending Kyiv from the ...

‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...

Keith Houston’s history of emojis reveals that explicit images as well as political provocations, flagrant brand ...

As with William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, with which it invites comparisons, Ferdinand Mount’s new book, The Tears of the Rajas, concerns the early days of the British in India. It covers much of the ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

During Luftwaffe-enforced periods of evacuation to Wales, I recall warbling at the local Methodist chapel a horrible little song about the heathen. The verse went: Draw draw yn China a thiroedd Japan ...

Behind the Lawrence Legend: the title suggests debunking, iconoclasm, the examination of dirty laundry – another contribution, that is, to the lively tradition of Lawrence-bashing that began with ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

Robert Skidelsky is a distinguished economic and political historian whose first books were published in the 1960s. Many decades (and volumes) later, he has turned to giving us a warning from history ...

Blood on the Snow crowns Robert Service’s four decades of work on the Russian Revolution and its perpetrators. It differs in focus from his studies of the Bolshevik Party, Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin, ...