In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, a drama played out thousands of miles away in Beijing. Two court officials were arguing about how Italian Jesuits in China should be treated. One of these, ...

Henrietta Leyser’s book is a travelogue rather than a narrative. It was born from two moments of well-justified indignation. In 2007 the author took an American friend to Bede’s World at Jarrow, the ...

He had grown up in a house where nothing was said about what really mattered – where history filled the silence and annals of the parish supplanted personal lives. He grew used to secrets; he absorbed ...

If you asked ten people in Britain when the First World War ended, the odds are that nine out of the ten would plump for 11 November 1918. It is true that the Cenotaph stretches the end date to 1919, ...

‘He talks slowly but continuously’, said one of Henry James’s later amanuenses, who of course wrote most of it down. The writing-down in part produced what can only be called the ‘world’ of James’s ...

In 1945, as the Second World War came to an end, the Allies planned to put Germany’s leaders – including Adolf Hitler, if he could be captured alive – on trial. This would not be easy. The American ...

Entertaining, well researched, intelligent and easy to read, this book, as the author explains, is about the private lives of royalty from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and about how the business of ...

Denis Diderot, at Catherine the Great’s insistent invitation, spent the autumn and winter of 1773–4 in St Petersburg. It was the worst time of year for an ageing philosopher, underdressed, plagued by ...

Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000) is famed for his twenty ‘tales’ – as he called them – about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, one of the great pairs of ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

The Pulse Glass opens with Gillian Tindall’s account of sprinkling the ashes of her younger brother beside a defunct railway line near where they had lived as children, and closes with an account of ...

William Trevor, the much-admired writer of more than thirty novels and collections of short stories, died in 2016. He would have been ninety this year, and to remember and celebrate him this ...