Twenty years ago I proposed to a publisher a book about parties in literature and history. I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or ...

Convinced of her own brilliance, Gertrude Stein wished to be ‘as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan’ and laboured tirelessly to ensure that her celebrity would outlive her. @sophieolive examines the real ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming ...

If asked to name the most consequential global business figure of the last half-century, few would choose Masayoshi Son. The Japanese billionaire has not invented any transformative technology, like ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a ...

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...

The box lay on the table. ‘Everything is in here,’ the man in white said in a thick German accent. ‘I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people,’ he continued, ‘now it’s your ...

We all have an appointment with death – or do we? It may sound outlandish, but there are those who, encouraged by the latest advances in the study of gerontology, or how ageing occurs, believe that ...

It would be easy to assume that Hunting the Falcon, by historians John Guy and Julia Fox, is yet another addition to the huge number of biographies of Anne Boleyn and her husband, Henry VIII. But it ...

Shehan Karunatilaka’s freewheeling debut, Chinaman, won a clutch of awards in 2010. In it, a cynical, drink-soaked narrator tries to track down a possibly dead cricketer in a Sri Lanka riven by civil ...