Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beg

The Last Days of Pompeii The immersive exhibition Immerse LDN, Excel, London, until March 15 Vesuvius was always erupting in nineteenth-century London, to the delight of hundreds of thousands of eager

Blinding: The Left Wing Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, trans. by ...

Collecting fields often have holy grails, and in medieval illuminated manuscripts one is the Roman d’Alexandre or Romance of Alexander. The 20cm-tall book, written in Old French and illustrated with 1

You wouldn’t guess from the cover design—three songbirds silhouetted over swatches of picturesque Englishness—but Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems hits one of its sweet spots with a

Best books… Roy Foster The emeritus professor of ...