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 ...

And yet, as Eric Marshall White persuasively argues in his admirable new biography of Gutenberg, such methods did not and ...

It’s said that Oxford was spared destruction on the scale of Coventry because Adolf Hitler wanted the place as his capital after he conquered England. Ashley Jackson’s engrossing new book describes ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Convinced of her own brilliance, Gertrude Stein wished to be ‘as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan’ and ...

Twenty years ago I proposed to a publisher a book about parties in literature and history. I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or ...

What does it mean to be modern? The answer was largely determined rather early in the modern era by three thinkers who, as luck would have it, not only came from the same place and spoke the same ...

How did we get where we are, we human freaks of nature? Language, rational thought, art, science and technology set us apart from other species. Add to that list (more curse than accomplishment) an ...

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had ...

Children’s literature is a Snarky beast: hunt for it and you’ll find a Boojum. Texts written for adults, like J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, snuck into children’s hands; editions of J K ...

The good news is that we’re all doomed. Humankind has made such a hash of the stewardship of creation that God looks like a chump for entrusting it to us. Most of the biosphere would be better off ...

Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion ...