‘Dornford Yates’ was the pen-name of novelist William Mercer, 1885–1960. Of all the authors whose fiction has got about my wits, none has tempted me so clamorously to find out about his factual life.

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 ...

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 ...

Lustrum, the second volume of Robert Harris's trilogy following the life, career and political travails of Cicero, is a splendidly researched historical blockbuster of real human depth and political ...

There’s plenty wrong with rights, Nigel Biggar tells us, as some very powerful thinkers have been saying since the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ first entered the lexicon of mass democratic ...

Family and politics: it is quite a topic. How far should the branches of royal families spread? What about the influence of brothers, partners or children in contemporary democratic politics, as with ...

How does an Oxford academic follow up a prize-winning trade book, a newly researched biography of Geoffrey Chaucer? And, moreover, in lockdown, when archives and libraries are largely inaccessible?

Yet another book on the origins of the Second World War might seem excessive, but this one takes an original approach. Its focus is on the quality and accuracy of information obtained through ...

The first note known to have sounded on earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid (a kind of cricket) rubbing its wings together, a fact deduced by scientists ...

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 ...

Quentin Skinner’s remarkable new study surveys ‘the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times’. The book’s extraordinary scope is matched by a bold thesis, which is ethical and ...

The phrase of the last US president that is least missed today – and there are many candidates – may be the one celebrating ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Keith Fisher will probably not forgive me for ...