For a country of just eleven million people, whose population ranks eighty-fourth in the world, between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Greece has a large and imposing history. When many Anglo-Saxons think of Greece, they think of the ancients: the millennium of the Trojan War and Athens’s wars with Persia and Sparta, of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and of Alexander the Great’s Hellenic empire. Russians and the Eastern Orthodox tend to think of the age of Byzantium... read more

If I want to walk along the river near where I live, I have to cross one of the busiest roads in west London. The only access is via an underpass, an enclosed tunnel where a female friend of mine was once sexually assaulted. Every time I use it, gritting my teeth and checking whether anyone is approaching from the other side, I think about how much of the urban environment is designed without a thought for the safety of women. Caroline Criado Perez gives... read more

‘Historians of alchemy’, wrote Herbert Butterfield in 1949, ‘seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.’ Seventy years on, readers may believe that this gloriously rude assessment needs no updating. But what, then, are we to make of the fact that the greatest scientific hero of them all, that model of geometric rationality, Isaac Newton, devoted a great proportion of his life to the pursuit... read more

There has been a lot of Gainsborough about recently, notably the three exhibitions that ran concurrently in Bath, in Sudbury and at the National Portrait Gallery. If these have been the tip, Hugh Belsey’s superlative catalogue of Gainsborough’s portraits is the whole of the iceberg... read more

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die in their first year and – perhaps even more agonisingly – three of her sons reach the ages of five, six and ten before... read more

We book reviewers like to be kind: as my late father, Cyril Connolly, used to opine, it takes someone years to craft a book, whereas the work of the critic occupies mere days. Some critics relish writing stinkers – it’s much more fun and readers don’t instantly forget a hatchet job – but mostly we tend to overpraise. This is why it might be supposed, from reading a... read more