It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

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 ...

Kit de Waal’s second novel, The Trick to Time, begins with Mona, a sixty-year-old Irish immigrant, standing by her window in the middle of the night. She notices a man in the building across from her ...

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 ...

STRICTLY SPEAKING, JOHN Winthrop (1588-1649) was not one of the Pilgrim Fathers of New England. He did not sail on the Mayjlower in 1620. But ten years later he led, as elected Governor, a fleet of ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

John Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity is everything a popular mathematics book should be: gentle, chatty, anecdotal and full of mind-aching equations. It is a history of algebra – the study of number ...

In the USA, the Holocaust has become an inescapable feature of public life. There is a Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington, a Holocaust Day, commemorative parks in many cities, and ...

Sometime during the 1970s the witch was transformed from a black-hatted crone to a wise medicine women. The spell was cast by radical feminist historians, determined to find their own heroic ...

The paradox at the centre of High Fidelity is that while pop songs almost always involve love, passion and raw feeling, the kind of men who are most intensely addicted to pop music tend to be a bunch ...