The Munich crisis in 1938 triggered air-raid precautions, including the distribution of gas masks and sandbags. Actual war in ...

Changed in a Minute - The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed) ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen - What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade ...

The art of biography (which Kipling called ‘higher cannibalism’) involves being remarkably picky. Even when the whole of the subject’s body is laid on the table for consumption, one biographer goes ...

Sharpe père died in 1944, shortly before he could be apprised of the realities of Belsen. Even with the benefit of Brendon’s ...

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had ...

With Saints, Amy Jeffs makes her own contribution to the centuries-old tradition of abridging and compiling saints’ lives.

Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers are, by now, one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction. Everyone with even half an eye on the genre knows he’s somewhere near the top. He is ...

The late American president Ronald Reagan told a press conference in 1986: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”’ That remark ...

Yu Hua, an author new to me, has written a great deal, sells well in China, and has a sizeable international reputation. This is his first non-fiction work translated – and very nimbly, too, by Allan ...

‘If there is an occupation for which women are utterly unfitted, it is that of the detective,’ claimed the Manchester Weekly Times in 1888 – already behind the times, it seems, as women had been ...