Paul Smith

“Most people can name the great leaders and major battles of the past,” writes the Oxford historian Peter Frankopan. “But few can name the biggest...

“Ageing is not the same for women as it is for men,” said Ellen Pasternack in The New Statesman. Whereas men might fear frailty and...

“The Romans had an expression to describe an outrageously impossible task,” Facilius sit Nili caput invenire: it would be easier to find the source of...

Norman Mailer, the subject of Richard Bradford’s “lively” biography, was “everything we have learnt to despise in the 21st century”, Born to Lithuanian Jewish parents...

“You might feel as if you’ve already read Prince Harry’s memoir,” But when you read it from cover to cover, Spare proves to be much...

“It began, probably, in a cave,” “In the sweltering August of 1919”, a 30-year-old bank clerk named Thomas Stearns Eliot – on a walking holiday...

In her new book, Cannibal Capitalism, Nancy Fraser offers an expansive history of capitalism, proceeding from mercantilism and 19th-century theories of laissez-faire to 20th-century state-organized...

Fans of Haruki Murakami are “highly unlikely” ever to have the opportunity to “corner him at a book-signing session”, the author of Norwegian Wood and...

“Katherine Rundell is a scholar, a fabulous writer and a born enthusiast,” said Matthew Reisz in The Observer. Earlier this year, she published an acclaimed...

The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis It can be too easy to forget the dark periods that our republic has survived...

The “heart-stopping story” of the Cuban Missile Crisis has been “told many times before”, said Saul David in The Daily Telegraph. But never has it...

Raine Spencer is chiefly remembered as “Princess Diana’s ‘wicked stepmother’”, said Marcus Berkmann in the Daily Mail. In the 1980s, she became a “tabloid hate...

Like many doctors, Henry Marsh had come to believe that serious illness was something that “only happened to patients”, As a result, the neurosurgeon spent...

The idea that humans can live for ever has long been central to religion, But increasingly, it “has other devotees”. Progress in the nascent science...

Buckminster Fuller, the architect, inventor, and futurist, “could come across as almost a secular saint,” In the hours-long talks he gave around the world after...

“Travel for pleasure was once the preserve of young aristocrats taking the Grand Tour,” But in the early 19th century, a crucial change took place:...

Roald Dahl is “very easy to cast as a villain”,He was arrogant and overbearing, a “distant and wayward husband”, and an “unforgivable anti- Semite”. Yet...

“On the evening of 26 April 1974, four thieves armed with AK-47s broke into Russborough House in County Wicklow, the vast Palladian pile belonging to...