‘One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives,’ according to anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, is ‘that they dry everything up, reduce people ...

Contrary to many people’s perception of him, Plato did not spend his entire life listening to Socrates philosophising in colonnades in Athens or writing dialogues meandering through complex ideas. He ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

With his debut novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, the Guardian journalist Xan Brooks proved himself a writer of solidly constructed historical fiction. In his second book, he ...

Don’t impress me with peasant virtues, said Chekhov, I have peasant blood in my veins. Patrick Joyce has the blood too. His people won a living from the hard lands of Dúiche Seoighe, or Joyce Country, ...

There is a tradition of authors setting out to ‘discover’ England and writing books about what they find. Such works were particularly common between the wars. H V Morton published In Search of ...

How is a totalitarian state like a love affair? They both leave archives behind when they go. How is a totalitarian state like a bad love affair? The archive that survives the end of each is a ...

It would be easy to assume that Hunting the Falcon, by historians John Guy and Julia Fox, is yet another addition to the huge number of biographies of Anne Boleyn and her husband, Henry VIII. But it ...

Last year Finneas O’Connell, the brother and creative partner of Billie Eilish, released a poignant song called ‘The 90s’, which fixated on a decade ‘when the future was a testament/To something ...

In 1923, a group photograph was passed around the security agencies of the West. Placed in the centre was Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, the agency charged with exporting the Bolshevik ...

‘“Let us be unconventional or we die!” is the unspoken, yet very evident, aspiration of the Modern Woman,’ fulminated the artist and travel writer Charles George Harper in Revolted Woman: Past, ...

Paul Auster has described his previous novel, 4321, as ‘the biggest book of my life’. It is big not just in the physical sense (at more than one thousand pages, it is at least twice as long as any of ...