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 ...

W hen 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 ...

On a cross-Channel ferry at the start of her honeymoon, my mother met Clement Attlee. In those innocent days, there was nothing odd about a former prime minister exchanging a few words with a stranger ...

Family and politics: it is quite a topic. How far should the branches of royal families spread? What about the influence of brothers, partners or children in contemporary democratic politics, as with ...

Will Tosh’s Straight Acting opens with a fleet-footed history of Shakespeare’s sexuality as presented in the scholarly literature and closes with Tosh’s own conclusion that Shakespeare was ‘bi rather ...

N ever mind the physics and the biology and the chemistry. Forget all about the rods and cones and the mysterious workings of the cerebral cortex. Colour, says James Fox, is primarily a cultural ...

It’s said that Oxford was spared destruction on the scale of Coventry because Adolf Hitler wanted the place as his capital after he conquered England. Ashley Jackson’s engrossing new book describes ...

John Adamson: Boudoirs & Barricades - The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 by Robert Darnton ...

Blood on the Snow crowns Robert Service’s four decades of work on the Russian Revolution and its perpetrators. It differs in focus from his studies of the Bolshevik Party, Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin, ...

T here was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of ...

It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long ...

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 ...