What a difference a decade makes. In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

‘Impossible.’ Thus spake Martin Amis at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October: ‘Very few writers have got anywhere with sex.’ Nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award seem to have viewed this ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

Denis Diderot, at Catherine the Great’s insistent invitation, spent the autumn and winter of 1773–4 in St Petersburg. It was the worst time of year for an ageing philosopher, underdressed, plagued by ...

On the evening of 13 December 2003, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, a combat team from the US 4th Infantry Division arrived at a small farmhouse by the River Tigris, north of Baghdad. Soldiers ...

‘Historians of alchemy’, wrote Herbert Butterfield in 1949, ‘seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.’ Seventy years on, readers may believe that this gloriously rude ...

Shortly before his death in 1974, R C Zaehner, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, observed that young Westerners who had turned away from Christianity were more often drawn ...

Coal used to be everywhere in Britain. Without it, there would have been no foundries, no trains and no gas lamps. Just after the First World War, there were over a million miners. They exercised a ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...