In the days following George W Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on a US warship just returned from the Persian Gulf, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the region in which the West’s ...

For those of us who lead lives of quiet desperation this book puts matters into perspective. The journalist Peter Zimonjic was on one of the three Tube trains – a bus was also blown up – bombed on 7 ...

Marc Morris is an up-and-coming historian, with a biography of Edward I and an influential volume on castles already under his belt. Here he attempts an ambitious overview of the Norman conquest from ...

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, ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

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 ...

Consider Hugh Trevor-Roper’s description in The Mind of Adolf Hitler of the European cultural order we would have grown up with if the Panzers had prevailed in 1945 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It is odd to read a novel one simultaneously admires and loathes. The admiration is for the book’s intelligence, lack of sentimentality and often extraordinary phrase-making: the loathing is for the ...