Caroline Moorehead 
Thinly veiled threats
No one could ever accuse Shereen El Feki of lacking in courage. To spend five years travelling around the Arab world in search of dildos, questioning women about foreplay and… Read more
Apocalypse now
In his introduction, James Fergusson apologises for the title of his book. Somalia, he writes, may no longer be the most dangerous place on earth. Since the summer of 2012,… Read more
Occupation Diaries, by Raja Shehadeh
A group of friends, Palestinian and foreign, go to picnic at a wadi between Jerusalem and Jericho. They are wearing bright, casual summer clothes. On a nearby rock sits another… Read more
From Austria to Australia
Moriz Gallia from Moravia and Hermine Hamburger from Silesia met and married in Vienna in 1893, when the city was the third largest European capital after London and Paris. They… Read more
Lest we forget
It was not possible, as Primo Levi memorably wrote, to convey the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps because no one had survived to describe death in the gas… Read more
Good companions
‘Choose your companions’, says an early Arab proverb, ‘thereafter your road.’ In the 1970s, Hugh Leach’s companion on his travels to Northern Yemen was Freya Stark, and she has become… Read more
Days of wine and shrapnel
Virginia Cowles was a 27-year-old American journalist working for the Hearst newspapers when she went to Spain for the first time. It was March 1937; the battle of Guadalajara had… Read more
Stemming the human tide
Long before the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 and began their advance across France, preparations were underway for what to do about the civilians who had been displaced… Read more
Light thoughts in a dark time
Ruth Maier’s Diary, edited by Jan Erik Vold, translated by Jamie Bulloch ‘Why shouldn’t we suffer when there is so much suffering?’ wrote Ruth Maier to her friend the Norwegian… Read more
Poule de luxe
‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich once observed. ‘Pauline was as beautiful as it was possible to be’, the Austrian statesman Metternich… Read more
Time out in Tuscany
In the spring of 2006, Rachel Cusk and her husband decided to take their two small daughters out of school and spend three months, a season, exploring Italy. She felt… Read more
The yellow star of courage
Journal, by Hélène Berr, translated from the French by David Bellos ‘What must be rescued,’ wrote Hélène Berr in her diary on 27 October 1943, ‘is the soul and the… Read more
A war of words
Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert Paradoxically, wrote Jean Paul Sartre, never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation, for having lost… Read more
Of zyzzyva and syzygy
Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy Make no mistake: Scrabble is a brutal game. Given a chance to foil an opponent,… Read more
A futile solution
In 1939, the six-year-old Eva Figes escaped Nazi Berlin for London. Her family were secular Jews and her father, who had been arrested after Kristallnacht, had spent some months in… Read more
Less mighty than the sword
Caroline Moorehead on Daoud Hari’s memoir of Darfur When Daoud Hari was a boy, the villages of northern Darfur were peaceful places. He had a camel called Kelgi, to which he… Read more
Putting the jackboot in
He who holds Rome, Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin in November 1943, ‘holds the title deeds to Italy’. Two months earlier, immediately after the armistice and the surrender of the… Read more
Lost and found
When Starbucks in the United States decided to promote Ishmael Beah’s memoir of life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone it seemed to many a surprising choice. A Long… Read more
A Frenchman for all seasons
From soon after his death in 1838, Prince de Talleyrand, First Minister, Foreign Minister, President de Conseil and Grand Chambellan under a succession of French governments, became the subject of… Read more
Papa on the warpath
In 1961, when he was 62, Ernest Hemingway shot himself. Almost half a century later, this bombastic, vainglorious, paranoid man, whose writing captured the minds not only of his own… Read more
Latest blogs
- ‘Soldier beheaded’ in south London: the Islamists repeatedly said they would do such things Douglas Murray
- The Sweet Sorrow of following Somerset Cricket Alex Massie
- Breaking: soldier ‘beheaded’ in Woolwich, south London The Spectator
- Exclusive: Clement Attlee backs Michael Gove’s free schools Fraser Nelson
- The chancellor survived the IMF report, but there’s another challenge ahead James Forsyth
- Summer party season begins Steerpike
- Cameron leaves the goal open for Clegg and Miliband on tax avoidance Isabel Hardman
