Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and moved, at the age of four, to nearby Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi. His father was a taciturn justice of the peace ...

The Inside Story of HS2 by Sally Gimson ...

New Tariff in Town - The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump: What the Trade War Means for the World by Philip Coggan ...

The most reticent and troubled member of the so-called New York School of Poets, James Schuyler (1923–91) gave his first ...

About Time - Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein by Diana Kormos Buchwald & Michael D Gordin ...

On the cover of Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s welcome new omnibus edition, Garner peers out to sea, compact, observant, determined, ...

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Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

This is a strange book, written with considerable charm and plenty of gorgeous detail, but difficult in many ways to get a handle on. The life referred to in the title is not Philip Hensher’s own, but ...