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 ...

In the prelims of his book, under a brooding photograph of his hero, Sander Meredeen quotes Richard Holmes to the effect that ‘one of the jobs of biography is to bring back the lost or the forgotten, ...

Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...

Serial killers, convicted or alleged, undoubtedly exude a kind of corrupt majesty. Among them, for sheer originality and rather whiffy charisma, the modern emperor must be Jeffrey Dahmer. It was, of ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

In his superb American Pastoral, Philip Roth displayed signs of wanting to examine his kind of people in greater philosophic depth: Swede Lermontov, a Newark Jew who has moved to the mink-and-manure ...

Henry Phillips, Glenda George, George Craig, David Coward: French Books in Brief - Ideas in Seventeenth Century France by E J. Kearns; Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Drama and Thought by Robert ...

Just before Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and ruler of Bohemia, was, as the Irish put it, shot off, Walter Frentz made a colour portrait photograph. Hitler, anticipating further staff losses ...

Death is the one promise life makes to us that it always keeps. From Homer, whose warriors at Troy are engulfed in the darkness of death, to Larkin glumly ‘going to the inevitable’, writers have shown ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...

Hitler had, in a sense, the greatest shotgun wedding of all time. His lady friend, Eva Braun, had been kept in seclusion, as Hitler made out that he was wedded to the nation, and he did not pay her ...