For a computer programmer, or indeed anyone at all, Ada Lovelace had the oddest start in life. She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and hence should have been the female incarnation of ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

A phrase like ‘fortress England’ seems to echo down the centuries, and turns up again in This Little World, Nandini Das’s new ...

The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac (Translated from French by Lauren Elkin) ...

Death of a Democracy by Victor Sebestyen; Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer ...

Ted Powell follows the argument set out in two seminal essays about Churchill and the monarchy, by Philip Ziegler and David Cannadine, and breaks little new ground. But Churchill and the Crown is the ...

A Visual History by Thomas W Laqueur ...

The sequel to Iain McGilchrist’s much-lauded The Master and His Emissary (2009) occupies two mighty volumes. Nearly 1,600 pages of text are supported by 2,500 references and thousands of footnotes ...

Some of the most disagreeable people I have encountered in three decades of financial journalism work in private equity. A ...

Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...

Born into raffish Polish-Russian gentry in 1870, Vera Gedroits resisted convention from an early age. Passionate and ...

The earthquake and tsunami in 2011, compounded by radiation contamination, were the most devastating catastrophes to strike Japan since the Second World War. Most cruelly, they hit Tōhoku, the ...