When Pietro Russell, the anti-hero of A Fool’s Alphabet, thinks of an afterlife, he imagines ‘a hell that is entirely composed of hotel bathrooms’. There will be the bars of soap, too tightly packed ...

‘This is the story of two middle-class families’, a prefatory note to All Our Yesterdays tells us; two families, it goes on, that suffer the ‘impact of Mussolini’s fascism’. It is also a ‘simple story ...

Ian Kershaw enters a crowded field with To Hell and Back, the first instalment of a two-volume history of Europe’s horrendous 20th century. Anyone interested in the period already has a formidable ...

When I was young, England was a much odder country than it seems today, and every now and then – much to the delight of its inhabitants – its oddity was celebrated in print by some fond but puzzled ...

There is now a thriving C S Lewis industry. It would be very surprising if this were the only book about Lewis to appear this year. Of course, there is also something of an A N Wilson industry. It ...

Tom Stern: Ecce Homunculus - The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869 by Daniel Blue ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

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 ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

Eva Hoffman’s Extraordinary Exit into History takes us from the Baltic to the Black Sea. From Poland, we travel through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. But the authoress is no hardy ...

Ben Hutchinson: Voilà un Homme! - Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski (Translated by David Dollenmayer) ...