I drive to Wiltshire on a rare sunny English summer’s day to interview V S Naipaul in his country home. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are to be reissued (by Picador in Britain and Knopf in ...

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of ...

The earthquake and tsunami in 2011, compounded by radiation contamination, were the most devastating catastrophes to strike Japan since the Second World War. Most cruelly, they hit Tōhoku, the ...

Fanny Duberly was the horse-loving wife of a Victorian cavalry officer. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854 she was twenty-six, cheerful, childless and strong-minded. She was among the handful of ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

Shakespeare has a lot to answer for when it comes to the portrayal of English kings, whether heroes or villains – especially when interpreted by Laurence Olivier. The actor’s hyperbolic version of ...

Anthony Gottlieb’s new book is the second instalment in a planned three-part history of Western philosophy. The first volume, The Dream of Reason, took the story from Socrates and Plato to the ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

Most great British institutions had a ‘bad’ Bosnian war. John Major’s Conservative government resolutely refused to intervene to prevent ethnic cleansing, and stopped the Americans from doing so for ...

In this book on the eighteenth-century designer William Kent, Tim Mowl recalls how he ‘outed’ Horace Walpole in a lecture to the Georgian Group: ‘A number of ladies walked out in protest. It was not ...

The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

William Boyd’s novel Restless, winner of the 2006 Costa Novel Award, describes the adventures of Eva, a young Russian émigrée, who is recruited for the British Secret Service during the Second World ...