‘Rawleigh is a great name in our history, and fills a space in our imagination,’ wrote Isaac D’Israeli in 1841. Walter Ralegh’s various extraordinary careers – colonist in Ireland and the New World, soldier, courtier, unfortunate lover, poet, perhaps the most ambitious English historian before Gibbon – have ensured that he has been lionised as the most brilliant of those thrusting Elizabethans who advanced their fortunes through exploration, military heroics and literary endeavour. ... read more

‘A dragon is no idle fancy,’ wrote Tolkien in 1936, but ‘a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold’. The potency has only increased over the last eighty years. Dragons crowd the pages of modern fantasy; no one needs telling that Daenerys, the Mother of Dragons, holds a crucial place in George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones universe. Tolkien nevertheless also declared that ‘dragons, real dragons … are actually rare’, counting ‘only two that are significant’... read more

One evening in late 1908, Henri Matisse introduced a short, dapper visitor to the community of often struggling artists who tended to congregate at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. Picasso was there, as was his iconoclastic painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, then still known by its original title, Le Bordel d’Avignon. Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s lover and muse, was underwhelmed by the newcomer... read more

Anyone writing about the subject of narco-trafficking must grapple with what could be called ‘the lie of legality’. It is duplicitous to try to draw a line between ‘licit’ and ‘illicit’ drugs when describing the present carnage in Mexico, the ravages of drug abuse and the idea of our upright society waging a war against drugs. Drug cartels are corporations ... read more

A political scientist working at Birkbeck College, London, Eric Kaufmann is ‘a quarter Latino and a quarter Chinese’. He was raised in Canada but his father’s family was of Czech-Jewish background. His original expertise was the history of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland. Like Richard English, the historian of the IRA, he has diversified into the study of nationalism. Unusually, Kaufmann is fluent in opinion surveys and political demography too. That alone ensures that Whiteshift is a very substantial book... read more

Sequences of novels that follow characters through a long period of time are popular with writers and readers because they allow fiction to represent the experience of living. In Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75) and John Updike’s Rabbit quintet (1960–2000), the decades spanned allow minor characters to become unexpectedly relevant – and deaths to feel like real losses – in the way that they do in life. Sue Townsend’s nine books about Adrian Mole, published between 1982 and 2009, introduce the hero as a teenager neurotically measuring his penis ... read more