When, in 1842, Queen Victoria saw Jenny, an orangutan that had recently arrived at London Zoo, she is reported to have commented that she found the ape ‘disagreeably human’. Like Charles Darwin, who ...

This labyrinthine curiosity begins with a ten-page glossary of ‘historic terms’, certain of which remain in everyday use in discourse on the New Forest. They may be ancient but they are not archaic.

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. In both the USA and Latin America, there is a long-standing belief that the countries of the Americas have a ...

JOHN CAMPBELL CONCLUDES his monumental biography of twentieth-century Britain's greatest peacetime prime minister with the Latin tag: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Margaret Thatcher's eleven ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

If novels are going to be as rich in reference as Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, I do think the publishers should be encouraged to add optional reading lists at the end. Fludd is a funny, exquisitely written ...

They gave us Kant and Herder, Frederick the Great and Kaiser Bill; they gave us red Gothic castles and dreary country estates; they gave us Berlin and the Junkers, and when they disappeared, their ...

Ammonites and Leaping Fish is a title as engaging as I suspect the author, Penelope Lively, to be. Born in Cairo in 1933, she was a typical upper-class English child of those times. Her father was a ...

These two books look at medicine down opposite ends of the telescope. The second tells us what it is like to be a doctor in modern conditions; the first reminds us just how recent a phenomenon in ...

White Heat is not short of detail. Examining the qualities which made outsider Edward Heath win the race for the Tory Party leadership, Dominic Sandbrook reveals that four different newspapers used ...

There have been many books recently featuring the brave little fighter plane that arguably saved Britain from Nazi subjugation – notably the memoirs of Geoffrey Wellum, one of the ever-dwindling 'Few' ...