The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

Never mind the physics and the biology and the chemistry. Forget all about the rods and cones and the mysterious workings of the cerebral cortex. Colour, says James Fox, is primarily a cultural ...

Rose Tremain used to chafe against being called a historical novelist, a description that seemed to stick to her after the publication of her breakthrough novel, the Booker Prize-shortlisted ...

Louis XV had a problem with Paris. Until the late 1740s, he had regularly visited the capital on his way from Versailles to his favourite hunting grounds in the forest of Compiègne. But over the ...

It’s said that Oxford was spared destruction on the scale of Coventry because Adolf Hitler wanted the place as his capital after he conquered England. Ashley Jackson’s engrossing new book describes ...

In the Book of Judges, the people of Gilead identify their Ephraimite enemies on the banks of the Jordan by demanding they say ‘shibboleth’, the Hebrew word for ‘stream’. If the captive says ...

Nigel Biggar retired a few months ago from the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He is a notable figure in the world of moral philosophy, not only because of his ...

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...

In Behind Closed Doors, Polly Curtis tells the story of how families are broken down by poverty and broken up by social workers. Her book is based on the premise that children who need the state to ...

In 1910, a telegram arrived on HMS Dreadnought, warning of the imminent arrival of a group of Abyssinian royals. When the party of six boarded shortly afterwards, they were given a tour of the ship by ...

The end of the world is in the air. Should we be surprised? The climate emergency claws at every aspect of our lives, from holidays to the cost of food. We’ve just lived through a global pandemic. War ...

It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long ...