When William Caxton opened Britain’s first printing press 550 years ago, he helped the country form a shared language and literary culture, as a new exhibition reveals

Children’s appetite for reading is in alarming freefall, says historian Dominic Sandbrook

In Caravaggio’s “St Matthew and the Angel” (1602), the Bible seems to arrive as a shock to those who wrote it. Matthew, bare-armed and dirty-toed, is a fisherman stranded on dry land. Everything about

So Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in October 1876, charting the latest instalment of the Holbein cult. He was renting a room in Isleworth, west London, still hoping for a religious career

The Germans possessed two monstrous M-Gerät howitzer guns nicknamed ‘Big Bertha’ – but they were barely finished and had undergone no testing when the First World War broke out. Even so, on 2 August 1

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the