A hundred years ago to be one of a million Englishwomen was to be doomed. Even intelligent and educated girls could not get a post as a governess – there were too many. Hundreds of thousands resorted ...

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in which he anticipated how we would spend our time a hundred years ahead. Keynes ...

According to a list of previous books printed in On the Plain of Snakes, this is Paul Theroux’s fifty-first full-length work. Demoralising news for the sluggish, especially as the new offering is ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Lithium is a silvery-white metal that is so light it can float on water and so soft it can be cut with a butter knife. Along with hydrogen and helium it was produced during the Big Bang and so formed ...

A Britain without the South Asian British is now almost unthinkable. With a few exceptions – farming, fishing and the armed forces spring to mind – there are few sectors of UK life where the ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

There’s plenty wrong with rights, Nigel Biggar tells us, as some very powerful thinkers have been saying since the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ first entered the lexicon of mass democratic ...

Forgive me if I sound a bit fractious, a little staccato this month; the imminent arrival of the Academy Club downstairs has subjected us to long weeks of shuddering floors and dull reverberating ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 has long been regarded as a historical watershed ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...