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 ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

One’s initial response is, why bother? Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of Robert Graves covers the same period as Good-bye to All That. It is no criticism to say that she writes less well than ...

What a difference a decade makes. In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

The easy way to write a full-scale life of Winston Churchill is to quarry material from the official biography, eight huge tomes completed by Martin Gilbert and accompanied by documentary volumes that ...

Halfway through reading Ed Yong’s first book, I found myself in A&E with a son in anaphylactic shock after he unwittingly ate some nuts. According to the book I’m reading, I told the medics gathered ...

The bibliography of Philip Mansel’s new life of Louis XIV is as impressive as I expected it to be. It lists every kind of history and biography, as well as unpublished manuscripts, newspapers of the ...

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 ...

Back in 1966, The Times gushed over Pakistan’s success, describing it as ‘one of the most remarkable examples of state and nation building in the post-war period’. In the decades since, the ...

The public apparition known as ‘Sir Roy Strong’ has been created partly by himself (his insistence on wearing those funny hats and drawling his exaggerated likes and dislikes on television) and partly ...