War novel nasties can usually be spotted by their titles: The Whores of War, Wheels of Terror, Slaughterground, Cauldron of Blood, Mountain of Skulls, Reign of Hell, Blood on the Baltic. The dust ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

How did we get where we are, we human freaks of nature? Language, rational thought, art, science and technology set us apart from other species. Add to that list (more curse than accomplishment) an ...

Marie Antoinette as few had seen her before. Perched on the edge of her seat on the way to her execution, arms bound, lank hair poking free of a decidedly unglamorous cap, David’s queen looks resigned ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is this year's winner of the @BGPrize. In her review from our June issue, ...

Does anything ever truly happen in the Messiah? This extraordinarily popular tripartite choral work, first performed in Dublin in 1742, consists almost entirely of saying rather than of doing.

How can one measure the spirit of an age? Writing in 1963, the historian Harry Hopkins suggested that although the English still consumed much more suet pudding than apple strudel, for students of ...

In 1989, when Thomas Heatherwick was eighteen years old, he picked up a Taschen book about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in a student book sale. Inside it, he saw a double-page spread showing ...

The title of Polly Barton’s second book, Porn: An Oral History, is a touch misleading. Rather than write a history of the porn industry with reference to its producers and performers, Barton has ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is this year's winner of the @BGPrize. In her review from our June issue, ...

One of my journalism professors, a gruff newspaper editor named Klaus Pohle, once posed a question about mass media that is both critical and unresolvable: where does the public interest end and the ...

Peter Wright, son of a long-wave radio pioneer, was a scientist with a talent for improvisation who flourished in the unstructured environment of the Admiralty Research Laboratory during the Second ...