Crim con is one of those great eighteenth-century terms. Jaunty and crisp, it sounds like it must be a lot of fun, whatever it means. The unabbreviated phrase, criminal conversation, is a euphemism ...

The year 1918 was an extraordinary historical moment. As the Great War roared to an end after four long years of blood and horror, it appeared briefly that the future of the world lay wide open. 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 ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

Perfectly timed for the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic narrative of the Hundred Years’ War takes the story from Richard II’s death in 1399 ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

No one who was in Paris on 7 January 2015 will ever forget the fear and horror that coursed through the entire city that day. This was the date of the massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine ...

‘Life Writing’ is all the rage nowadays, and two reasons suggest themselves. We live in a narcissistic, egalitarian age in which self-expression is seen as a virtue and a right; and technology not ...

THE STORY IS well known, or used to be. In 1491, six years after the Battle of Bosworth, a young man appeared in Ireland, claiming to be Richard of York, the younger of the princes in the Tower, who ...

The period between the conversion of Constantine the Great in AD 312 and the accession of Theodosius II in AD 408 witnessed one of the most dramatic changes in world history. The Roman Empire, the ...