On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

Clodia Metelli has gone down in history as one of the great femmes fatales of ancient Rome. Cicero shuddered at her ‘confident airs’ and intense ‘oxen eyes’ and jibed at her fondness for holidaying in ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

In the USA, the Holocaust has become an inescapable feature of public life. There is a Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington, a Holocaust Day, commemorative parks in many cities, and ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

In the April issue of Literary Review Nick Holdstock ended his perceptive review of Michael Meyer’s In Manchuria by asking where the ‘great books about country life’ in other parts of China were. Now, ...

The late journalist Deborah Orr’s moving memoir of her Lanarkshire childhood is about many things but, unwittingly perhaps, it does demonstrate how extremely difficult it is to describe one’s parents.

One of the Selected Thoughts of Chairman Mao begins, ‘A revolution is not a dinner party,’ and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (to give it its full name) everyone quoted that Thought ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...