Keith Houston’s history of emojis reveals that explicit images as well as political provocations, flagrant brand ...

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of ...

John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse; John Singer Sargent: The Charcoal Portraits by Richard Ormond ...

It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long ...

According to the American academic William Kelleher Storey, Rhodes was able to go a long way towards realising his vision ...

There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book.

Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a ...

Robert Skidelsky is a distinguished economic and political historian whose first books were published in the 1960s. Many decades (and volumes) later, he has turned to giving us a warning from history ...

For decades Lucy Ash has produced intrepid, pioneering radio broadcasts and essays. She has spent half her life in dangerous places, in particular Russia’s power centres and its most remote regions.