It is hard to think of a person more qualified to write this book. In addition to being an art historian, a prolific writer, a lecturer and a broadcaster, James Stourton is also a former chairman of Sotheby’s UK. He joined the auction house in 1979 and left in 2012 to become a senior fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. Throughout his long career in the art market, he has seen ... read more

After writing a string of award-­winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken the glamour of the Mughals and the murky dealings of the English East India Company to look beyond the Indian subcontinent and make the case for the existence of a wider, pre-Islamic ‘Indosphere’. His aim in The Golden Road is, he says, ‘to highlight India’s... read more

Children’s literature is a Snarky beast: hunt for it and you’ll find a Boojum. Texts written for adults, like J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, snuck into children’s hands; editions of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books appeared with ‘adult’ covers to spare their grown-up readers’ blushes. It’s an unstable, intertextual field, with books referring to and borrowing from each other endlessly. Critically, it’s... read more

In June 2001, I was at a reception for the president of South Africa at Windsor Castle, deep in conversation with that county’s minister of tourism and irritated that someone was insistently tapping me on the shoulder. Turning around, I realised it was a courtier. Behind him stood Queen Elizabeth II, talking to somebody else. I had not realised that this is how monarchs must socialise: ploughing steadily through the throng with... read more

Peter Wright, son of a long-wave radio pioneer, was a scientist with a talent for improvisation who flourished in the unstructured environment of the Admiralty Research Laboratory during the Second World War. He came to the attention of intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic in 1949, when, as a navy scientist attached to the Marconi Company, he revealed the workings of... read more

The arrival of each new David Hepworth book is not unlike the release of the albums about which he writes with such precision and rigour. Hotly anticipated by the nostalgic ageing and the inquisitive young alike, it comes in its familiar jacket, the black-and-white photo redolent of the golden age of the British music press, the orange livery mirroring that worn by Penguin Classics. It’s a formula... read more