Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

For a country of just eleven million people, whose population ranks eighty-fourth in the world, between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Greece has a large and imposing history. When many ...

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 ...

There he is on the cover, clever and tousled; there he is on the back cover, too, a little less scruffy this time, in suit and open-necked shirt. Then the author photograph, suit and tie to the fore, ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is ...

Two of the founding spirits of humanitarian aid, Henri Dunant and Florence Nightingale, held diametrically opposed views on how to help those caught up in wars. For Dunant, all assistance should be ...

When the third instalment in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet intruded though my south London letter box, the daffs on the balcony were waning and the tulips were warming up on the touchline to take their ...

Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...

When Empire, Incorporated comes out in paperback, it will be able to boast about providing the historical background to what we have recently come to know as one of the world’s most inept as well as ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...