History
The plight of the predestined
There could be no backsliding while preparing the next plot, murder or battle in the French Wars of Religion, says Hywel Williams
What we really really didn’t want
The title of Alwyn W. Turner’s book could deter readers. Even the Hollywood film The Secret Lives of Dentists promised…
Kill or cure
Charles Cullen, an American nurse, murdered several hundred patients by the administration in overdose of restricted drugs. Hospitals should be…
Ruthless Roundheads
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?
Pomp and severance
The Coronation Chair currently stands all spruced up, following last year’s conservation, under a crimson canopy, by the west entrance…
Bloody Vikings
Forget that guff about peaceful farmers with an interest in travel
History’s great success story
The Tudors, England’s most glamorous ruling dynasty, were self-invented parvenus, with ‘vile and barbarous’ origins, Anne Somerset reminds us
Set in a silver sea
‘Tom Island’ — that was the name I was given once by a girl I met on an island in…
A monumental testimony
With Spain’s economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of…
The secret fertility service
The strange tale of how 500 women were helped to conceive after the first world war
They weren’t all shooting up or shooting each other
Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came…
Men of mystery
People, they say, want different things from a book over the summer than they do the rest of the year.…
Conspicuous consumption
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian?
One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced…
Crime and no punishment
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…
Behind the masque
Music has always been integral to the image and power of monarchy. Our present Royal family should take note, says Jonathan Keate
The future that was
Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…
Cheaper than chimps
After the Morecambe Bay Hospital scandal a new era opens of compassion, -whistle-blowing, naming names and possible prosecutions. But what…
Still a ticking timebomb
No book about Dr David Kelly could start anywhere other than at the end. Kelly is found, dead, in a…
