The flamboyant hostess and ‘psychic’ interior decorator does seem like a comic creation – but she was real enough, and perhaps madder than Ludwig Bemelmans lets on

The lovable rounded character of The Canterbury Tales has been ridiculed over the centuries for her sexual appetites, completely subverting Chaucer’s focus

Thackeray’s amoral schemer is recast as a ruthless tabloid journalist, splashing gossip, hacking phones and pursuing personal vendettas

Shocked by the authoritarianism of Cuba and the USSR, the Peruvian writer turned his back on communism in the 1960s, influenced by seven liberal European thinkers

He certainly had delusions of grandeur, but his ambition to educate a people newly emerged from slavery showed a true visionary spirit

A festive gathering in the depths of rural France is fatally disrupted by a trio of sinister strangers

The initial reluctance of Britain, France, Poland and the US to share intelligence allowed the Nazis to hone their deception skills to early advantage

Peter Hitchens is in no doubt that it was. But a dominant, self-perpetuating meritocratic elite, all head and no heart, might also have presented problems

Iwan Rhys Morus describes how novelists’ futuristic visions began to be realised by engineers – though the course of invention is more random than he imagines

There has never been a golden age or even a very stable one, says Diane Purkiss, in a serious consideration of how English food has changed over time

From their brothels in lawless 1850s Monterrey, Eliza and Jean set out discover why their fellow workers are going missing

‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamt up,’ the former naval intelligence officer Ian Fleming once said.…

Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and she’s craving the lemon cake she once got from Dean & Deluca deli…

In the penultimate entry of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary, an autofictional daily record of a writer named Toby Litt…

The most influential Native American visitor to Europe in colonial times was a fiction. The protagonist of L’Ingénu, Voltaire’s novel…

The X-rated movies he’d seen by the age of ten included Deliverance, Taxi Driver and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – which he’d then discuss with his child psychologist

According to a new history of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I was chiefly to blame for the crisis of 1588

Despite the leader’s commitment to secularism and democracy, the persecution of Muslims and Dalits continued after independence

Giulia retreats to her isolated farmhouse to avoid bombardment in Turin, and grows increasingly attached to the partisan couple she shelters

The former Lord Chief Justice confesses that some of his liberal ideas didn’t turn out so well in practice

Hettie Judah describes how its various owners were plagued by bankruptcy, divorce, suicide, madness – and savaging by wild dogs

Steam trains, historic monuments and the family grocer were replaced by motorways, tower blocks and supermarkets. But at least there was humaner legislation

Unfairly dismissed as hucksters and fishwives, itinerant traders drove the capital’s expansion for centuries, says Charlie Taverner

Guy Shrubsole laments that the temperate rainforest that once covered a fifth of Britain has now shrunk to pitiful fragments on its western fringe

How long can a fugitive avoid detection after holing up in a city ‘big enough to be anonymous in’?