In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

Among the British Museum’s prodigious collection of cuneiform tablets and fragments, strangely parallel experiences befell two scholars. First, in the 1870s, George Smith identified two pre-biblical ...

The Portrait Miniature: A New History draws on the collection of around two thousand miniatures at the V&A to trace almost ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

For Western observers in particular, few Japanese institutions have proved so enduringly exotic: the tattoos, the severed ...

From Denying to Embracing the Inner Lives of Animals, de Waal, who died in 2024, describes the incident with Thai. Thai cared ...

If I want to walk along the river near where I live, I have to cross one of the busiest roads in west London. The only access is via an underpass, an enclosed tunnel where a female friend of mine was ...

THE SCOPE OF contemporary US dominance is unparalleled in human history. America has 752 military facilities in 130 countries, some of them until recently part of the Soviet empire. What the American ...

In the first weeks of 1946, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock started work on a new project. The couple, in their mid-thirties, ...

In his masterly Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, the Canadian writer Wade Davis re-envisaged attempts to climb Mount Everest in the 1920s as a response to the ...

In 1945, as the Second World War came to an end, the Allies planned to put Germany’s leaders – including Adolf Hitler, if he could be captured alive – on trial. This would not be easy. The American ...