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 ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

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 ...

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 ...

In this detailed and tautly written account, Guy Walters daringly takes a wrecker’s ball to that treasured national icon, the Great Escape. It is a heroic historical endeavour because the myth of the ...

It is a brave, some might say foolish writer who embarks on a history of the English Civil War these days. The grand historical narratives of the war that raged from 1642 to 1649, written by the likes ...

‘For thou wert there’, says Coleridge, wonderingly, in the lines he addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him recite The Prelude – the ‘there’ in question being the Revolution in France. Wordsworth ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

March 2025 Issue Adrian Poole Cheer Up, Hamlet Shakespeare’s Tragic Art By Rhodri Lewis Shakespeare is Hard, but So is Life By Fintan O’Toole LR April 2022 Issue Lucy Lethbridge Life Lessons from the ...

Keith Houston’s history of emojis reveals that explicit images as well as political provocations, flagrant brand ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...