In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in which he anticipated how we would spend our time a hundred years ahead. Keynes ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

A friend who plies his trade as a bookseller in Cornwall tells me that the only person who can compete with his level of physical grunt work, humping boxes into his van and armfuls of dusty books onto ...

It is common enough to review a book by a friend, but rare when that friend is not just the author of the book but also the publisher, and not just the publisher of the book but of the magazine in ...

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 has long been regarded as a historical watershed – but did it mark the start of a new era or the culmination of longer-term trends? Philip ...

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 has long been regarded as a historical watershed – but did it mark the start of a new era or the culmination of longer-term trends? Philip ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

The Spanish Empire was an improbable creation. Relatively poor, meagrely populated and only recently integrated, Spain nonetheless built the largest realm the world had seen. From a landlocked capital ...

Last year, visitors to the British Museum’s exhibition ‘Living With Gods’ were greeted by a strange figure carved from a mammoth’s tusk, 31cm tall and 40,000 years old. It had a human body and a ...

Has it ever occurred to you that the last millennium and a half of Western civilisation could have easily been pagan? Or Manichaean? Or Muslim? Or that, even if it were Christian, it could have ...

Why do we never talk about Heliogabalus? For those who enjoy stories of depraved Roman emperors, he knocks the sandals off Caligula and Nero. The nicknames he acquired after a reign of just four years ...