It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity. Kate Loveman tells the tale. Arthur ...

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 ...

O nce upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

Edward Casaubon is one of the less appealing characters in Middlemarch. A selfish and ageing clergyman, whom Dorothea Brooke unwisely marries, he devotes his time and attention to an encyclopedic ...

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 ...

Henry Hemming has written one of those books that get to the heart of the Northern Ireland Troubles. If I were asked by an outsider, say an English friend, to recommend a work that goes deep into the ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

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 ...

In 1989, when Thomas Heatherwick was eighteen years old, he picked up a Taschen book about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in a student book sale. Inside it, he saw a double-page spread showing ...

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 ...

S ome books have the capacity not only to define a generation of readers but also to shape a new generation of writers. Annie Ernaux’s Passion simple, published originally in France in 1991 and in ...

The French Revolution abounds in ironies. But there are few to match the bloodless coup d’état of November 1799 that brought an end to the Revolution’s decade-long series of experiments with ‘popular ...