Frederick Augustus (1670–1733), elector of Saxony and king of Poland, owed his sobriquet ‘the Strong’ to such feats as crushing a tin plate in his hand (mentioned by Rilke in the ‘Fifth Duino Elegy’) and to his vigorous sex life. Contemporaries credited him with fathering 354 illegitimate children; Tim Blanning soberly reduces the number to eight. This biography is concerned not with court gossip, however, but with Augustus’s political career and cultural achievements. Blanning celebrates Augustus as the virtual creator ... read more

Marie Curie’s life was defined by professional triumph and personal tragedy. Ninety years after her death, she remains history’s most famous woman scientist. Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize – in 1903, she and her husband, Pierre, received the award for physics. In 1911, she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry. She is still the only Nobel laureate to be garlanded in two scientific fields. Yet after her husband’s death in a freak traffic accident in 1906, ... read more

You would think that there were dozens of histories of British art out there, along the lines of an art history course I came across titled ‘Caveman to Picasso’. Oddly, there are not, and those that exist cannot always be trusted. This most enjoyable book is an exception. Bendor Grosvenor says in his introduction, ‘The story of the development of British art is rarely told in a single, chronological account, and partly for this reason, our understanding of how British art evolved, who made it, for whom, and what it represents, has been distorted.’ ... read more

‘Comet’, ‘meteor’, ‘shooting star’: to his contemporaries only the prodigies of nature came close to matching the brilliance and disruptive power of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), the dazzlingly handsome royal favourite who, for more than a decade, was the most powerful figure in early Stuart England. But the analogy was also double-edged. For prodigies – so astrological theory held – were also portents of disaster in the state. Here, as in so much else, the duke did not disappoint. Athletic, well-educated and... read more

In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People, he was humiliated by two famous men of letters, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, as he attempted to meet them. By this time, Salter had published three novels himself: two of them drew on his experiences in the military, while the other, A Sport and a Pastime, recounted an affair in provincial France... read more

In the run-up to the 2019 election, an extremely irate man appeared on Question Time attacking Labour’s plans to increase taxes on those who, like him, earned over £80,000 – in other words, the top 5 per cent of earners. He accused them of lying, claiming he was ‘nowhere near in the top 5 per cent … I’m not even in ... read more