Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers are, by now, one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction. Everyone with even half an eye on the genre knows he’s somewhere near the top. He is ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...

You might shrink from calling a leading Chinese author inscrutable, if that wasn’t the way the Chinese see him too. But Ah Cheng is as much puzzled-over in his homeland as he is widely read. At first ...

The Travels of Norman Lewis by John Hatt (ed) ...

Hitler’s Royal Welcome - The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration by Stephan Malinowski (Translated from ...

For two hundred years, Britain needed coal. The men who braved dreadful danger to hew it out of rocks miles underground were ...

There is a charming naivety to Noo Saro-Wiwa’s travelogue. Focused primarily on trying to capture the experiences of Africans living in China, it becomes a tourist adventure through the country, the ...

Essays in Austrian Literature by W G Sebald (Translated from German by Jo Catling) ...

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 ...

This is an illuminating political memoir about the break-up of the political tribe that won the Cold War. It can be read with profit even if you disagree, as I do, with the thesis it is wrapped up in.

The most consulted file in the National Archive is the Jack the Ripper dossier. So much work has been done in this field we might wonder if there is anything worthwhile left to say. However, the ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...