There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would ...

Fragments of pottery excavated in Poland tell us that around seven thousand years ago Neolithic farmers were transforming milk from sheep, cattle and goats into a solid food that could feed them in ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

In many ways, The Road to the Country is the novel Chigozie Obioma has been steadily heading towards. Utilising fable and prophecy – prominent across his earlier novels The Fishermen (2015) and An ...

There is a story about René Descartes according to which the philosopher once owned a female automaton so convincing that a superstitious mariner, seeing the machine in operation, declared it the work ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

Children’s literature is a Snarky beast: hunt for it and you’ll find a Boojum. Texts written for adults, like J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, snuck into children’s hands; editions of J K ...

This is one of the great works of modern scholarship. Professor John Morrill of Cambridge University and eight other editors have, after fifteen painstaking years, compiled all 1,077 of Oliver ...

In the run-up to the 2019 election, an extremely irate man appeared on Question Time attacking Labour’s plans to increase taxes on those who, like him, earned over £80,000 – in other words, the top 5 ...

Family histories tend to follow an established format. The story of the author’s ancestors gets interwoven with that of the author’s own journey as they explore the past, discovering something about ...

For some time, Anglo-American historians have been obsessed with the G word. The word is not ‘God’ but ‘global’. Using it, we have learned to tell a self-comforting story. Until recently, we begin, we ...

Joseph Stiglitz is a man of the Left, but he’s no crabby Corbyn. He’s a lovely fellow and a brilliant theorist of economics (Nobel Prize, 2001). Like his mentor Paul Samuelson (Nobel Prize, 1970), he ...