A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a ...

I first went to look at medieval manuscripts in Longleat House in the early 1970s. In those days readers were placed in an ...

“Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind”, W. B. Yeats wrote in 1927; “sex and the dead.” ...

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be ...

The French economist Thomas Piketty is best-known for Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) – a study intimidating in length (704 pages, with an audio version ...

At first glance the subjects of Elisa Gabbert’s third essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self, might elicit an eye roll. Another essay about Frankenstein? Gabbert’s sixteen pieces, many ...

Fathers and Fugitives is a strange and beautiful book that unfolds unexpectedly. It is a gloomy book, too, suffused with a quality the writer Jan Morris once saw in S. J. Naudé’s fellow South African ...

Chawton House, with its extensive gardens and parkland, once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight. He arranged for his sisters and mother to live in a villa nearby (now the Jane Austen’s ...

For a century now, in pursuit of a more convincing representation of the swirling rhythms of the mind, authors have been tempted to do away with one of the building blocks of fictional convention – ...

Time of the Child is Niall Williams’s twelfth novel, and his third to explore the fictional Irish village of Faha, located in the rural west where Williams himself, a native Dubliner, has made his ...

In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining Earth’s geological timeframe, made a shock decision. It rejected the proposal that since 1952 we have ...