The life of Henri Bergson provides rich material for an intellectual biography. Philosopher of the lived experience of time and of the élan vital in biological and psychological life, he became at the ...

“Manchester is the south of the north”, writes Jeanette Winterson: spot-on. I’ve never met anyone who has a clear mental map of the place. On the ground it seems to have a grid pattern, but the roads ...

The French economist Thomas Piketty is best-known for Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) – a study intimidating in length (704 pages, with an audio version ...

Bernard Cerquiglini is a former director of the Institut national de la langue française, and the first part of his catchy title quotes the former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who was ...

The Norwegian novelist Hanne Ørstavik is fairly explicit about the fact that her chief subject is love. Her first novel to be translated into English bore the title Love (2019; Kjærlighet, 1997), and ...

The Restoration of 1660 gave rise to the powerful and enduring myth that monarchy has always been Britain’s destiny. Charles Stuart’s escape via an oak tree after his defeat at Worcester in 1651, ...

Mutant cockroaches. Vampires terrorizing Washington. Bigfoot. Hallucinogenic drugs made from the blood of schizophrenics. A slug-eating inbred family living in underground caves. Killer dogs. Killer ...

In that interlude between 1933 and 1941, when not much was going on in the world, “unquestionably the nastiest looking bit of work that ever dropped on to a breakfast table”, in the words of its ...

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a creature of contradictions. For Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, Mary Gordon ...

Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland from the 1690s to the 1730s, could supposedly bend a horseshoe with his bare hands. In Latin he was allegorized as “Hercules Saxonicus”. He ...