What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

he King Arthur of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, written between 1856 and 1885, is the King Arthur of Malory and the French romance tradition before him: Lancelot and Guinevere, Mordred and Merlin, ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

I’m going to start this review with an admission: I have next to no idea what this book is about. Not in a literal sense, obviously; there is a writer called Rachel Cusk, who used to be married and ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

Taichi Yamada’s In Search of a Distant Voice was published in Japanese in 1989, completing a trilogy of novels which includes the ghostly Strangers, published to acclaim in English last year. His ...

This large book is both rewarding and demanding. It offers information in abundance and, like Sir Barry Cunliffe’s previous publications from OUP, it is beautifully written and illustrated. But what ...

A C Grayling has carved out a niche not only as a lucid and accessible interpreter of philosophy for the general reader but also as a passionate advocate for the role that it can and should play in ...

Constance Lloyd will for ever be remembered chiefly as Mrs Oscar Wilde, though she was an original and unusual person in her own right. As the subtitle of this new biography makes plain, Franny ...

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 ...