Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

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 ...

‘The Infant Modernists’ is one of the great unwritten works of critical biography. Shiningly specific childhood experience, the oeuvres of Woolf, Joyce and T S Eliot all insinuate, lies at the heart ...

Even in his own lifetime, King Henry VIII became notorious throughout Europe for his serial marriages. When Henry was combing the Continent for a woman willing to become his fourth wife, English ...

THE ARCHITECT ERNO Goldfinger was a man of many paradoxes. He was the son of a-wealthy lawyer and the grandson of a vice-president of a bank, yet he was a lifelong Marxist. Despite his politics, in ...

Drudge Culture - Small Holdings by Nicola Barker ...

The good news is that we’re all doomed. Humankind has made such a hash of the stewardship of creation that God looks like a chump for entrusting it to us. Most of the biosphere would be better off ...

Peter Davidson: Our Man in Fotheringhay - Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration by Nadine Akkerman & Pete Langman ...

There is a story about René Descartes according to which the philosopher once owned a female automaton so convincing that a superstitious mariner, seeing the machine in operation, declared it the work ...

Richard V Reeves: Why Some Are More Equal Than Others - Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea by Darrin M McMahon ...

Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion ...

In his penetrating and deeply personal introduction to the much-anticipated Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, the Korean-born literary critic Kwon Youngmin recounts a formative episode from his ...