‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...

On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

Death is the one promise life makes to us that it always keeps. From Homer, whose warriors at Troy are engulfed in the darkness of death, to Larkin glumly ‘going to the inevitable’, writers have shown ...

Hitler had, in a sense, the greatest shotgun wedding of all time. His lady friend, Eva Braun, had been kept in seclusion, as Hitler made out that he was wedded to the nation, and he did not pay her ...

Sir Thomas Wyatt was the ambassador, the ‘beloved familiar’ and allegedly the rival in love of Henry VIII. During his rather short but fiery lifetime, he found himself banished from court and clapped ...

Anyone who reads this book will either like it a lot or be moderately irritated. The reason is that it is unashamedly written from certain positions on race, gender and class, the three preoccupations ...

HAVING SERVED ONLY half of his four-year sentence for perjury, Jefrey Archer was released from prison last July. In celebration, Macmillan Audio Books is releasing freshly abridged titles. This one ...

As with William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, with which it invites comparisons, Ferdinand Mount’s new book, The Tears of the Rajas, concerns the early days of the British in India. It covers much of the ...

The Old Ways is ‘the third book in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart’, the other two being Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. They offer a lucid and often beguiling mix of ...

Hearts of oak sailors of Nelson's navy may have had, but as anyone reading this chronicle of disease, disaster and desolation would readily agree, they needed them. Life on the ocean wave within the ...