History
The Good Nurse, by Charles Graeber - review
Charles Cullen, an American nurse, murdered several hundred patients by the administration in overdose of restricted drugs. Hospitals should be…
The Rainborowes, by Adrian Tinniswood - review
Adrian Tinniswood, so gifted and spirited a communicator of serious history to a wide readership, here brings a number of…
Anne Boleyn’s last secret
Why was the queen executed with a sword, rather than an axe?
The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone, by Warwick Rodwell - review
The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance…
Sorry – the Vikings really were that bad
Forget that guff about peaceful farmers with an interest in travel
Tudor, by Leanda de Lisle - review
The Tudors, England’s most glamorous ruling dynasty, were self-invented parvenus, with ‘vile and barbarous’ origins, Anne Somerset reminds us
Island, by J. Edward Chamberlin - review
‘Tom Island’ — that was the name I was given once by a girl I met on an island in…
The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic, by Henry Buckley - review
With Spain’s economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of…
A secret sperm donor service in post-first world war London
The strange tale of how 500 women were helped to conceive after the first world war
The Ghosts of Happy Valley, by Juliet Barnes - review
Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came…
Magic, by Ricky Jay - review
People, they say, want different things from a book over the summer than they do the rest of the year.…
Edwardian Opulence, edited by Angus Trumble - review
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
Niccolo Machiavelli, by Corrado Vivanti; The Garments of Court and Palace, by Philip Bobbitt
One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced…
The Annals of Unsolved Crime, by Edward Jay Epstein - review
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…
Music & Monarchy, by David Starkey - review
Music has always been integral to the image and power of monarchy. Our present Royal family should take note, says Jonathan Keate
Adhocism, by Charles Jencks - review
Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…
Against Their Will, by Allen M. Hornblum - review
After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what…
Dark Actors, by Robert Lewis - review
No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end. Kelly is found, dead, in a…
