In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been presented as a prototypical crusader, a paragon of religious toleration and the progenitor of a united Spain. David Abulafia goes in search of ...

Patrick McGuinness has written an unusual, and unusually interesting, first novel. Its title refers to the last hundred days of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s malign regime in Romania – the sole country in the ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

When, in 1982, Cibella Borges protested against her suspension from the police force for posing nude for a magazine, she insisted that her action had constituted no crime. 'She said she feared "the ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's ...

Sheer bluff, calling a book like this The Critical Heritage. The Critical Detritus would be nearer the mark. Any good writer needs to be read in a new way; it might be argued that the creaks and ...

David Edgerton is a myth-buster extraordinaire. Whether explaining how new technologies did not at once supersede old ones (steamships were slow to overtake clippers) or demonstrating that Britain was ...

For a huge book somewhat solemnly intended as a further pillar for a huge reputation (complementing a Collected Poems in 2003 and a Selected Translations in 2006), these letters of Ted Hughes are ...

Sir Alan Lascelles, known to his friends as ‘Tommy’, was a courtier. He served as Principal Private Secretary to King George VI from 1943 until his death, and to the Queen for the first two years of ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

Herculaneum, a town on the Bay of Naples that was buried beneath volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, has only been partially excavated. Some buildings stand open to the sky; others, such as ...

One’s initial response is, why bother? Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of Robert Graves covers the same period as Good-bye to All That. It is no criticism to say that she writes less well than ...