London’s architecture has become laughably boorish, confidently uncouth and flashily arid. Neomodern bling and meretricious trash are the current norms. Without exception, big-name architects turn out ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

Before beginning to write this review, I read that a lady in Portland, Oregon, has just exposed her bottom to a policeman in protest against a ‘men’s rights’ march. Even a connoisseur of human lunacy ...

James Buchan gives his life of John Law the subtitle ‘A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century’. ‘Adventurer’ is a more polite term than some that have been applied to Law: fantasist, scoundrel ...

Born in Dublin, Iris Murdoch was brought up in England and took a degree in classics at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1942. After two years as an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, she worked for a ...

You can learn a lot on a walk around Suffolk. For instance, consider the slender iron bridge that crosses the River Blyth between Walberswick and Southwold. It was constructed in 1875 for a narrow ...

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 ...

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 ...

It took liberals just two decades to turn from hubris to hand-wringing. When the Berlin Wall fell, their confidence was unbounded. The ‘End of History’ was declared. Liberalism had won. Today, with ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

I approached this book with low expectations. Ho-hum, I thought, a book about radiation written by a professor of radiation medicine. Probably some dull memoir by a retired old boy. How wrong I was.

Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...