Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

The lavatory facilities at Trisha’s bar, that glorious survivor of old Soho, adorned with photos of Al Capone and the pope, bear a legend written at eye level: ‘USE AS URINAL ONLY. NO SITTING.’ Except ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Earth was dying. We had five years left to live. Ziggy Stardust, the bisexual alien rock star, was sent from another planet to grey, binary 1970s Britain to give us a message of hope. I’m not sure ...

Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's anti-hero, George Smiley. But is this the missing link in le Carré’s oeuvre, asks @ddguttenplan, ...

Stephen Alford’s previous books include Burghley, a biography of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief adviser, and The Watchers, a study of the Elizabethan spy services, with particular emphasis on the ...

Peter Wright, son of a long-wave radio pioneer, was a scientist with a talent for improvisation who flourished in the unstructured environment of the Admiralty Research Laboratory during the Second ...

The year 1860 was a pivotal one in the Middle East, so pivotal that the great Albert Hourani made it the starting point of his Oxford University course ‘The History of the Modern Middle East’. Of ...

In his new book, Ed Husain takes the temperature of Muslim Britain by visiting mosques in ten cities across the UK at Friday prayers. There are 3.4 million British Muslims, divided by culture, ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...