Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

It’s often said that there are five stages of grief, from denial through to acceptance. The family at the centre of the first of these three debut novels, Dutch poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

This proved a difficult book to read: put down for a moment it was appropriated by someone else and thereafter continued to journey furtively about the house, pursued by frustrated readers. Treat it ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

Herculaneum, a town on the Bay of Naples that was buried beneath volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, has only been partially excavated. Some buildings stand open to the sky; others, such as ...

As India powers its way up the world GDP rankings, a case is being made for recasting its national history as ‘world history’. By looking beyond India’s boundaries and focusing on the global context ...

The political thriller has been perhaps the most successful fictional genre of the past decade, as Frederick Forsyth’s bank manager would doubtless testify. Yet very few politicians have tried their ...

From her second novel, What Are You Like? (2000), about twin girls separated at birth in Dublin, up to 2007’s Booker-winning The Gathering, in which historical sexual abuse within an Irish family ...

A hundred years ago to be one of a million Englishwomen was to be doomed. Even intelligent and educated girls could not get a post as a governess – there were too many. Hundreds of thousands resorted ...

Few people produce a new book in their hundredth year; fewer still at that age produce a book containing original ideas. But if anyone was going to do it, it surely had to be James Lovelock. He has ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...