AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

In 1545, the year in which he turned seventy, Michelangelo Buonarroti completed his last public sculpture, the tomb of Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Others might have ...

Yezhov means ‘Hedgehog’, although Stalin called him affectionately Yezhevichka, ‘little bramble’. Despite the implicit prickliness, there was momentary relief in the USSR when, in autumn 1936, Stalin ...

The commercial success of Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry’s film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, was impaired by its title, which gave, to those ...

In this book on the eighteenth-century designer William Kent, Tim Mowl recalls how he ‘outed’ Horace Walpole in a lecture to the Georgian Group: ‘A number of ladies walked out in protest. It was not ...

A C Grayling has carved out a niche not only as a lucid and accessible interpreter of philosophy for the general reader but also as a passionate advocate for the role that it can and should play in ...

To Guardian readers, the premise of State of the Nation will come as no surprise. A history of British theatre since the war, it makes no mention of theatre in its main title, following Michael ...

Chainless souls are a bit like stray dogs; you feel sympathy for them in theory but you don’t really want to be landed with them for very long. Katherine Frank’s A Chainless Soul, the first biography ...

Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers are, by now, one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction. Everyone with even half an eye on the genre knows he’s somewhere near the top. He is ...

Over 150 years after her birth, 109 years after mounting the British throne alongside her husband, George V, sixty-six years after her death, Mary of Teck has gone viral. Until the publication last ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Of all the many and wretched women processed through these pages, the luckiest is surely Mildred Martin, who supervised Roth in ‘independent reading’ at Bucknell University. She admired him and has ...