Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that ...

Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in 2001, Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his ...

The good news is that we’re all doomed. Humankind has made such a hash of the stewardship of creation that God looks like a chump for entrusting it to us. Most of the biosphere would be better off ...

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller ...

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 ...

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 the late 1990s a wave of pink methamphetamine pills washed through the illegal drug markets of Southeast Asia. The pills, the journalist Patrick Winn tells us, smelled faintly of vanilla and were ...

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 ...

The end of the world is in the air. Should we be surprised? The climate emergency claws at every aspect of our lives, from holidays to the cost of food. We’ve just lived through a global pandemic. War ...

Frederick Augustus (1670–1733), elector of Saxony and king of Poland, owed his sobriquet ‘the Strong’ to such feats as crushing a tin plate in his hand (mentioned by Rilke in the ‘Fifth Duino Elegy’) ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

In the run-up to the 2019 election, an extremely irate man appeared on Question Time attacking Labour’s plans to increase taxes on those who, like him, earned over £80,000 – in other words, the top 5 ...