Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

JOHN CAMPBELL CONCLUDES his monumental biography of twentieth-century Britain's greatest peacetime prime minister with the Latin tag: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Margaret Thatcher's eleven ...

Johnsey Cunliffe is a young Tipperary man with a disability that has rendered him somewhat lumbering and, in everyone’s estimation (including his own), simple. Despite this, the third-person narrative ...

John Gray is an acknowledged master of the calculated overstatement. He likes to make us think. And he does it by throwing the equivalent of intellectual hand grenades. Consider the following claim – ...

UNLIKE HITLER OR Stalin, of whom there are any number of decent modern biographies, Mussolini still seems ill-served by historians, at least those writing in English. A couple of years ago the ...

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 ...

Spying and deception were two aspects of the Second World War in which the British consistently outwitted the opposition. The breaking of the Enigma code enabled the boffins of Bletchley Park to read ...

Denis Diderot, at Catherine the Great’s insistent invitation, spent the autumn and winter of 1773–4 in St Petersburg. It was the worst time of year for an ageing philosopher, underdressed, plagued by ...

Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...

THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of Stalin's death last year should have brought about not just worldwide rejoicing, but a torrent of new biographies. The world was, however, distracted by the fall of a ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...