Crim con is one of those great eighteenth-century terms. Jaunty and crisp, it sounds like it must be a lot of fun, whatever it means. The unabbreviated phrase, criminal conversation, is a euphemism ...

Somehow, I don’t know how, I stopped reading William Boyd over the past decade. Was it the unappealing Armadillo, or the tedious Nat Tate, or the self-indulgent essays in Bamboo? At any rate, Boyd is ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

In 1939 and for at least the next fifteen years, Peter Fleming was much more successful and famous than his younger brother Ian. He was known as an explorer and adventurer, wrote bestselling books and ...

he King Arthur of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, written between 1856 and 1885, is the King Arthur of Malory and the French romance tradition before him: Lancelot and Guinevere, Mordred and Merlin, ...

IN JANUARY 1940 the Chef of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, recorded his impressions of the French army after a tour of inspection. In his diary he wrote, 'I say to myself ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

THE SPANISH CONQUEST of the Indies was one of the most important events in history, leaving an ineffaceable impression on global politics, language and culture. Yet among English speakers it is a ...

Anthony Gottlieb’s new book is the second instalment in a planned three-part history of Western philosophy. The first volume, The Dream of Reason, took the story from Socrates and Plato to the ...

In April 1958, nineteen-year-old Sheila Delaney, daughter of a Salford bus inspector, sent a manuscript to Joan Littlewood, director of the Theatre Workshop in London. She signed it Shelagh Delaney, ...

Moonstruck promises far more (especially in the subtitle) than it delivers. The claims presented here for the influence of lunar cycles on life are hedged around with such terms as ‘subjective ...

It is not hard to understand the continuing fascination with the crimes of Jack the Ripper 130 years on. Besides the shoal of books, there is even a new museum to exploit his ghastliness. The ...