We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s ...

When Pietro Russell, the anti-hero of A Fool’s Alphabet, thinks of an afterlife, he imagines ‘a hell that is entirely composed of hotel bathrooms’. There will be the bars of soap, too tightly packed ...

Richard Holloway is the first mate who incites a mutiny, makes his fellow mutineers walk the plank, dynamites the scuppers, and takes to a lifeboat. His has been a difficult life for his shipmates.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Michael Frayn has solved a problem for me. I am often asked to recommend a book that will get interested parties well into philosophy, and find myself at a stand because text-book introductions are ...

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 ...

Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...

Biographies of the little-known generally attract no more attention than their subjects did in their lifetimes – unless, as with Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Dickens’s mistress Nelly Ternan ...

MARGARET FORSTER IS the author of this fictional diary, a revelation which disappointed this reader; a compulsive diarist myself, I had thought it was genuine. Forster's invented diarist is a Miss ...

For a traditionally male-dominated society, China has had its fair share of powerful women who rose to the top, albeit thanks to their husbands. Under the Tang dynasty, Wu Zetian, who lived from 625 ...

It is a quarter of a century since Helena Kennedy’s book Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice was published. A great deal has changed in that time, a circumstance reflected in the less equivocal ...