Syphilis

Six months before Vincent van Gogh’s death, the critic Albert Aurier, waxing poetical, wrote an article entitled Les Isolés on the then unknown painter. It raised to sainthood the solitary genius driven to insanity by an uncomprehending world. ‘Is he not one of the noble and immortal race which the common people call madmen but which men among us consider sort of saints?’ The man had already become myth. His life would be a sacrament and his suicide a reproach. It has remained that way ever since. Miles J. Unger thinks otherwise. He recasts our hero as the very opposite of isolé, a painter whose stylistic development was totally dependent

The St Brice’s Day Massacre? I must admit I hadn’t heard of this ‘most just extermination’ of Danes in Oxford at the instigation of King Aethelred the Unready in 1002, perhaps because the teaching of history in this country tends to kick off in 1066. You certainly don’t think of Oxford as a place that pioneered techniques of ethnic cleansing. Crypt is a collection of seven essays that unearth details about how certain people lived and died in the past. If you didn’t already know Alice Roberts’s background as an anatomist and biological anthropologist, you’d have a good chance of deducing it from this book. The old jibe that archaeology