Amid all this, it’s undeniable that when it comes to what we serve up to the young, the dulcis (‘sweet’) and the utilis ...

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 ...

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 ...

They had started to feature in detective fiction too. It was studying the burgeoning market in ‘lady detective’ stories ...

After writing a string of award-­winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken ...

We learn about Lovelock’s efforts to find life on Mars, his invention of the electron capture detector (ECD), which revealed ...

Another of Wright’s projects, Operation STOCKADE, enabled MI5 and GCHQ to read the cipher messages that passed through the ...

It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

But Hope I Get Old Before I Die is different, because it’s a book that, since rock and roll’s infancy, nobody thought they’d ...

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 ...

Nicholas Shakespeare’s first novel since 2010 is a literary thriller set in a damp, wintry Oxford. The book’s protagonist will be familiar to Shakespeare’s regular readers: John Dyer appeared in his ...

‘What do you do for books?’ This is almost the first anguished cry from father to daughter recorded in these pages, and soon she was putting the same question to him. The persistence of the inquiry ...