‘Your immortal soul!’ my father used to shout, brandishing his fist. His lament was also a threat – to me, his teenage daughter, that I stood to lose my soul if I lost my Catholic faith. Nowadays, of ...

Has it ever occurred to you that the last millennium and a half of Western civilisation could have easily been pagan? Or Manichaean? Or Muslim? Or that, even if it were Christian, it could have ...

Wolfgang Münchau has, for more than thirty years, been one of the most acute and penetrating commentators on the European Union, writing in the Financial Times, the New Statesman and elsewhere. What I ...

This is a timely book. It reminds us of a particularly shameful moment in our modern history, when fascism, despite having just been defeated in a war in which millions lost their lives, once more ...

The desires of diarists, to paraphrase Lytton Strachey, are wonderfully various. They can be motivated by Schadenfreude, reportage, self-defence or simple record-keeping. Most diaries are destined ...

Fantasy benders. This is what the unnamed protagonist of Miranda July’s second novel, All Fours, calls her mental flights into weird, funny and often erotic alternate realities. ‘You can’t have ...

Nigel Biggar retired a few months ago from the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He is a notable figure in the world of moral philosophy, not only because of his ...

Why do we never talk about Heliogabalus? For those who enjoy stories of depraved Roman emperors, he knocks the sandals off Caligula and Nero. The nicknames he acquired after a reign of just four years ...

There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

Clarissa Eden’s 21st-century counterpart is Sir Philip May. They both married short-term prime ministers who failed in crises because of misjudgements that stemmed from their characters. Both Anthony ...