The writer Kate Summerscale has an enviable nose for events, once briefly notorious, that are still singular and disturbing, and often riven with ambiguities. She sweeps out forgotten, often violent corners of our domestic history, revealing how collective fears sometimes coalesce around specific incidents and how in retrospect these events are representative... read more

What do Genghis Khan, cotton, clocks, urban conflagration, Asia, gold, American indigenes, God, the pen, 1946, Jane Austen, the Inquisition, forced migrations, chemistry, prophecy, communism, Cesare Beccaria and the Battle of Midway have in common? You may have guessed it – they all ‘made the modern world’. Publishers seem ... read more

Francisco Goya y Lucientes was a mass of contradictions. He was a liberal, initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, who liked nothing better than to go hunting with successive absolutist monarchs of Spain. He was deputy director of the Royal Academy in Madrid, yet believed that traditional academic training was useless, insisting that ‘there are no rules in Painting’ and... read more

Jeremy Corbyn was the least likely party leader in the history of modern politics. Occasionally he is compared to an early Labour leader, George Lansbury, a figure on the left who led his party to electoral doom with a romantic flourish. But Lansbury had served as... read more

Towards the end of this lyrical and passionate book, the farmer James Rebanks describes how he is moving towards producing food using the minimum amount of artificial inputs, such as chemical fertilisers. ‘Sadly it means earning money away from the farm when we have to,’ he writes. This is a course of action that increasing numbers of farmers will have to pursue as we leave the EU’s subsidy system. But why ... read more

If you want to become a better person, you ought to study the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. That at least is the message of Steven Nadler’s delightful new book, and it may seem rather surprising. Spinoza’s bottom line was that mind and body are inseparable, that the entire world is a single unitary substance and that everything in it, from the stars and planets to our bodies... read more