Tom Stern: Ecce Homunculus - The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869 by Daniel Blue ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

Simon J V Malloch: First among Equals - Augustus: The Biography by Jochen Bleicken (Translated by Anthea Bell) ...

Brutal killings in London’s East End provide both the curtain raiser and final act for Judith Flanders’s insightful and dramatic staging of the story of Victorian Britain’s love–hate relationship with ...

In 1848, the wave of political uprisings taking place across Europe reached the Frankfurt street where the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was living, comfortably, off money from his father’s shipping ...

9/11 continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary fiction, from Jay McInerney's The Good Life to Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. The Reluctant Fundamentalist tackles the subject from a ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

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 ...

Nearly thirty years have passed since Edward Said published Orientalism. That book shifted the intellectual climate – more exactly, degraded it – by propagating a new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed ...

In Berlin at the end of the 1920s, a set of fake Van Goghs sent the art world reeling. The paintings had passed through the hands of Otto Wacker, an obscure Berlin art dealer, and had long been ...

Mary Hollingsworth: View from the Palazzo - Out of Italy by Fernand Braudel; A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar ...

In the wealth of aviation literature, there is an abundance of first-hand accounts by military pilots, particularly those of the Second World War. Civilian air travel has been served far less well, ...