Spies and Scholars could be entitled ‘Rogues and Impostors’ given the character of many of those Russians entrusted by their government, the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg and commercial backers ...

Michael Foot is a soldier and a scholar, which is a rare combination. He is a gentleman, too, something less identifiable nowadays. One of his principal subjects is Gladstone’s papers; the other is ...

Nicholas Shakespeare’s first novel since 2010 is a literary thriller set in a damp, wintry Oxford. The book’s protagonist will be familiar to Shakespeare’s regular readers: John Dyer appeared in his ...

Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art. @StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at. ‘I ...

In 1962, Martin Heidegger went on a cruise to the Aegean. Going to Greece had not been an easy decision. Seven years earlier he had got so far as to buy train and boat tickets; when the enormity of ...

Ring Down the Curtain - The Critic by Anand Tucker (dir) ...

Annihilation, an excoriation of contemporary France as a terminally ill society, bears all the trademark features of a Michel Houellebecq novel: a depressed white middle-aged anti-hero, Paul; ...

Yours Shamelessly - Dear Dickhead by Virginie Despentes (Translated from French by Frank Wynne) ...

Medieval documents – both books and individual documents, such as charters – survive in remarkable quantities. Neil Ker’s Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, which gives details about holdings ...

In late 2022, at the G20 summit held at a balmy resort in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, ...

After writing a string of award-­winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken the glamour of the Mughals and the murky dealings of the English East ...

It is hard to think of a person more qualified to write this book. In addition to being an art historian, a prolific writer, a lecturer and a broadcaster, James Stourton is also a former chairman of ...