On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

Few people produce a new book in their hundredth year; fewer still at that age produce a book containing original ideas. But if anyone was going to do it, it surely had to be James Lovelock. He has ...

Once you unstop your ears to its music, the siren song of the American road is hard to resist. I made my first coast-to-coast drive at the age of nineteen, setting out with a friend in my battered ...

As the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, President Trump has spread anti-Americanism more widely than at any time since the Vietnam War. Fifty years ago, Sarah ...

Taller with the Charm On - The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III by Edward Shawcross ...

British public life is sustained by a series of comforting delusions – as became very clear to me during five years writing leaders for a national newspaper, trying to reconcile the stories the ...

‘You know when you’re on one.’ That’s the working definition of a mountain that Ed Douglas gives at the start of this rich and adventurous book. While he does go on to explore more objective measures ...

Reports from Cuba by J S Tennant ...

For many, what would come to be known as Christianity was still a Jewish sect operating within the confines of the established Law (ie the teachings of the Torah). Yet Christianity was cosmopolitan ...

Six of the Best - The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World by Bojan Pancevski ...

The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker ...