I first went to look at medieval manuscripts in Longleat House in the early 1970s. In those days readers were placed in an ...

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a ...

“Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind”, W. B. Yeats wrote in 1927; “sex and the dead.” ...

It is 2022, and Phyl, after completing her university degree, has returned home to live with her parents in the quaintly named village of Rookthorne, from where she commutes to a zero-hours job at ...

“London has always been famous for its many and beautiful parks”, announced a 1966 guidebook to the capital; “just what those parks are famous for is not necessarily limited to the flowerbeds and ...

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be ...

This collection of correspondence between the novelist Shirley Hazzard and the scholar and translator Donald Keene is an exercise in high-minded curiosity and sophisticated largesse. Keene and Hazzard ...

The French economist Thomas Piketty is best-known for Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) – a study intimidating in length (704 pages, with an audio version ...