Nearly thirty years have passed since Edward Said published Orientalism. That book shifted the intellectual climate – more exactly, degraded it – by propagating a new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed ...

Civilisation has a very thin veneer. Acts of terrorism, wars, famines and disasters strip away the carefully accumulated rules that hold societies, even sophisticated ones, together. Sheri Fink, a ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

Ben Hutchinson: Voilà un Homme! - Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski (Translated by David Dollenmayer) ...

The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, Volume IV: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940 By Robert Self (ed) Ashgate 588pp £82.50 ...

Christopher Andrew: From Russia with Lev - Stalin’s Agent: The Life & Death of Alexander Orlov by Boris Volodarsky ...

‘It is always a joy to me to meet an American, Mr Moulton,’ remarks Sherlock Holmes in a story first published in 1890, ‘for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the ...

IN A CLASSIC feminist essay, the art historian Linda Nochlin asked 'Why Are There No Great Women Artists?' The answers, she concluded, lay in social institutions rather than the nature of genius: ...

Mikhail Bulgakov, most readers and critics would concur, is the most widely loved and perhaps the greatest Russian writer in the Soviet period of fictional prose and drama. Some might be more deeply ...

There is a passage in Angus Wilson's novel Hemlock and After that will undoubtedly afford amusement to literary historians of the future. A group of 'cultured' people are discussing a scheme for ...

Nicholas Roe: Encompassing Genius - Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch ...

Clare Bucknell: Thinkers & Drinkers - The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch ...