It is very difficult to uncover accurate connections between ideas and events in history. A.C. Grayling is a philosopher and polemicist with a particular story to tell about the rise of freedom in the 17th century. In the introduction to his new book he writes: I hope the sketches offered here will illustrate the claim
2015 has been a terrific year for women writers. I have especially enjoyed Mary Beard’s sceptical and subversive history of Rome, SPQR (Profile, £25); Alexandra Harris’s literary history of the English weather, Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (Thames & Hudson, £24.95); and Antonia Fraser’s witty memoir of growing up, My History (Weidenfeld, £9.99).
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts with the death of Dr David Kelly, the former United Nations weapons inspector, discovered dead in woodland on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire on 18 July 2003, shortly after casting doubt on the government dossier that
Sudhir Hazareesingh’s bold new book is built on the assumption that ‘it is possible to make meaningful generalisations about the shared intellectual habits of a people as diverse and fragmented as the French’. France, as General de Gaulle pointed out, has such a fetish for singularity that it produces 246 varieties of cheese. Can France
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking distance from an unnamed town on the coastline of County Clare, is home to the Madigan family. At the centre of the family is Rosaleen Madigan, the matriarch: ‘A woman who did nothing and expected
For his holiday reading in the summer of 1835, the literary and political journalist John Wilson Croker packed the printed lists of those condemned to death during the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France. The several thousand guillotined in Paris after the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal (10 March 1793) and before the fall of
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his
