Lead book review

The making of Van Gogh as an artist came at a terrible cost

19 April 2025 9:00 am

In the manic years 1886-88 when he lived with his brother in Paris, Vincent worked at fever-pitch, exhausting himself and Theo and driving them both towards insanity

William Blake still weaves his mystic spell

12 April 2025 9:00 am

Philip Hoare considers the ageless, hypnotic appeal of the painter, poet, visionary and ‘one-man utopia’

Poor little rich girl: the extraordinary life of Yoko Ono

5 April 2025 9:00 am

Her background was one of privilege and she married one of the most famous men of our time but the Japanese artist suffered her fair share of grief and misfortune

How Anne Frank’s photograph became as recognisable as the Mona Lisa

29 March 2025 9:00 am

To date, the diary, pieced together from Anne’s notebooks, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, with her story further explored in plays, films and novels

The dogged women on the trail of Dr Crippen

22 March 2025 9:00 am

Had it not been for the persistence of Mrs Crippen’s friends at the Ladies’ Music Hall Guild, the notorious murderer might have escaped scot free

The Bloomsbury Group’s precarious paradise

15 March 2025 9:00 am

The latest biography of Vanessa Bell explores her domestic and artistic radicalism but avoids the central contradiction of her life: deceiving her daughter Angelica for years over her parentage

A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain

8 March 2025 9:00 am

For decades, the CIA smuggled works by George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz and many others into the Soviet bloc in a battle for hearts, minds and intellects

The enlightened rule of the Empress Maria Theresa

1 March 2025 9:00 am

‘She hates to see anyone put to death’, said one contemporary of the monarch who abolished torture and serfdom and pioneered the practice of open weekly audiences with the public

The supreme conjuror Charles Dickens weaves his magic spell

22 February 2025 9:00 am

Peter Conrad reminds us how the skilled stage performer, always yearning for enchantment, even introduced a few disguised magic tricks into his fiction

In search of Pico della Mirandola, the quintessential Renaissance Man

15 February 2025 9:00 am

Though the scholar himself remains an enigma, his theories about language as a portal to the divine are explored in depth by Edward Wilson-Lee

The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology

8 February 2025 9:00 am

The short-lived 16th-century revolt resolved absolutely nothing, but it loomed large in Engels’s thought and in the official DDR interpretation of history

The international criminal justice system was prejudiced from the start

1 February 2025 9:00 am

Double standards have existed since its foundation in 1945, with the most powerful nations determining who should be held accountable for war crimes

For all its fame, the Great Siege of Malta made no difference to the course of history

25 January 2025 9:00 am

The victorious Hospitallers soon subsided into genteel irrelevance, while the Ottomans remained a formidable Mediterranean power for centuries to come

Red-letter days for Gilbert & George

18 January 2025 9:00 am

After a successful show in Moscow in 1990, the odd couple went on to even greater triumph in China three years later, as the long-suffering curator of both exhibitions describes

Once upon a time in Germany: the Grimms’ legacy of revenge and gory redemption

11 January 2025 9:00 am

The Household Tales only attained their standing after the brothers’ death, with the unification of Germany and the decades of nationalism that led to catastrophe

Emilie du Châtelet – a lone voice among Enlightenment thinkers

4 January 2025 9:00 am

The brilliant physicist’s warning to her contemporaries not to carry respect for great men to the point of idolatry fell on deaf ears

Celebrating Miss Marple, expert on the wickedness of village life

14 December 2024 9:00 am

The elderly spinster with a fine sense of evil was a creation Agatha Christie never tired of – unlike the ‘tiresome, egocentric’ Hercule Poirot

The mythic mishmash of Wagner’s Ring

7 December 2024 9:00 am

Its towering themes of gods, giants, dragons and magic were not purely Germanic in origin, whatever fever-dream they later conjured in Hitler’s brain

Besieged Odesa is still caught in a conflict of identities

30 November 2024 9:00 am

Older citizens have identified with Russia all their lives – and Russian is still commonly spoken everywhere. But young Odesans are now using more Ukrainian as a symbol of resistance

Is it time for Jordan Peterson to declare his spiritual allegiance?

23 November 2024 9:00 am

In an outstanding study of the Old Testament, Peterson teases out the inner meaning of one story after another. But though in effect signed up to Christian metaphysics, his beliefs are a mystery

Reading the classics should be a joy, not a duty

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Edwin Frank’s survey of 20th-century fiction stresses the po-faced seriousness of the great novel. But many masterpieces revel in the ridiculous – or are about nothing at all

Books of the Year II

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Contributors include: Peter Parker, Daniel Swift, Stephen Bayley, Justin Marozzi, Andrea Wulf, Hilary Spurling, Boyd Tonkin and Graham Robb

Books of the Year I

2 November 2024 9:00 am

Our regular reviewers choose the books they have most enjoyed reading in 2024

Is it up to pop stars to save the planet now?

26 October 2024 9:00 am

‘Walking by the banks of the Chao Praya on a breezy evening after a day of intense heat,’ writes Sunil…

The demonising of homosexuals in postwar Britain

19 October 2024 9:00 am

The tabloids in particular stirred up fear and distrust with lurid stories of orgies, prostitution, drug-taking, political corruption, sinister concealment and susceptibility to blackmail