London has always been famous for its many and beautiful parks”, announced a 1966 guidebook to the capital; “just what those ...

I first went to look at medieval manuscripts in Longleat House in the early 1970s. In those days readers were placed in an ...

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a ...

“Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind”, W. B. Yeats wrote in 1927; “sex and the dead.” ...

In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining Earth’s geological timeframe, made a shock decision. It rejected the proposal that since 1952 we have ...

Lays heaven at its feet, hell at its head, Its smiling face inverted into frown.

The French economist Thomas Piketty is best-known for Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) – a study intimidating in length (704 pages, with an audio version ...

Fathers and Fugitives is a strange and beautiful book that unfolds unexpectedly. It is a gloomy book, too, suffused with a quality the writer Jan Morris once saw in S. J. Naudé’s fellow South African ...

Chawton House, with its extensive gardens and parkland, once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight. He arranged for his sisters and mother to live in a villa nearby (now the Jane Austen’s ...

At first glance the subjects of Elisa Gabbert’s third essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self, might elicit an eye roll. Another essay about Frankenstein? Gabbert’s sixteen pieces, many ...

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be ...