The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 has long been regarded as a historical watershed – but did it mark the start of a new era or the culmination of longer-term trends? Philip ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...

Chil Rajchman was one of only a handful to survive Treblinka. Unlike Auschwitz, Treblinka was purely an extermination camp, where the only Jews not immediately gassed were Sonderkommandos employed in ...

Given the notorious reluctance of ghosts to appear before impartial observers, anyone attempting to trace the history of the supernatural faces peculiar difficulties. Books on this subject usually ...

Graham Greene once estimated that he wrote around two thousand letters each year. Many were dictated over the telephone to his secretary in London who would then type them out over pre-signed headed ...

'GRIM IS THE lot of the Russian poet: / an inscrutable fate / leads Pushkin to the pistol's barrel, / Dostoevsky to the scaffold', wrote the poet and magus Max Voloshin in 1922 after he witnessed the ...

Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000) is famed for his twenty ‘tales’ – as he called them – about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, one of the great pairs of ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

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 ...

The story of Saladin has been told many times. One of the most influential portraits of the 12th-century Ayyubid sultan appeared in a work of fiction, Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825). In that ...

There is, plainly, no logic in the unfolding of time.’ Pankaj Mishra makes this sceptical observation in order to undermine the theories of history that have inspired Western thinkers and leaders over ...

Part confession, part meditation on artists, Michael Peppiatt’s memoir about being an Englishman in Paris from 1966 to 1994 and again since 2014 probably reveals more than the author had intended.