Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

This is a timely book. It reminds us of a particularly shameful moment in our modern history, when fascism, despite having just been defeated in a war in which millions lost their lives, once more ...

Ancestors do turn quear, as Daisy Ashford says, and when you begin the third novel of a trilogy without knowledge of its forerunners, your fear is not so much that you won’t know who the characters ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

Anita Desai follows her Booker Prize shortlisted novel Fasting, Feasting with these nine wise and entertaining stories. She thanks the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for providing her with a generous ...

Who reads Neville Cardus nowadays? The Manchester Guardian’s cricket correspondent and classical music reviewer throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Cardus inaugurated the modern style of sports journalism ...

In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’ @rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool. Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way Richard Williams: In Their Own ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. ‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’ @rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis ...

Over twenty years ago, Umberto Eco artfully invented a mass-selling genre for the novel with The Name of the Rose, his postmodernist pastiche romp through medieval murder and theology. Since then, he ...

It is fourteen years since Dominic Sandbrook published Never Had It So Good, the first part of what was intended to be a three-volume history of postwar Britain. That nine-hundred pager, covering the ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...