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 ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

Every 9 November during the Third Reich, Hitler and his minions performed a solemn memorial rite for comrades killed during the struggle for power. The day that properly commemorated the dead of the ...

The era of dollar dominance might be coming to an end. But if not the dollar, which currency will be the backbone of the global economic system? @HowardJDavies weighs up the alternatives. Howard ...

‘Characters migrate.’ New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip takes this aphorism from Umberto Eco as its epigraph and it has multiple resonances in his novel. The thirteen-year-old narrator Matilda’s ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

9/11 continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary fiction, from Jay McInerney's The Good Life to Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. The Reluctant Fundamentalist tackles the subject from a ...

Malcolm Budd is a lecturer in Philosophy at University College, London. He knows a good deal about music, but whether as a listener, performer or composer we have no means, other than the direct ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...

Memories, memories, ah, fond memories! Flicking rapidly through the above-mentioned tome for the purposes of this review, I could not help but recall those golden days in the early Seventies – or was ...

Edward W Said, a scholar born in Palestine and educated in Egypt, is presently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on contemporary ...

Sebastian Faulks’s fourteenth novel shares many of the preoccupations of the previous thirteen. As in his early trilogy (Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray) and in much of his most ...