I drive to Wiltshire on a rare sunny English summer’s day to interview V S Naipaul in his country home. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are to be reissued (by Picador in Britain and Knopf in ...

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of ...

Fanny Duberly was the horse-loving wife of a Victorian cavalry officer. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854 she was twenty-six, cheerful, childless and strong-minded. She was among the handful of ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

Shakespeare has a lot to answer for when it comes to the portrayal of English kings, whether heroes or villains – especially when interpreted by Laurence Olivier. The actor’s hyperbolic version of ...

Anthony Gottlieb’s new book is the second instalment in a planned three-part history of Western philosophy. The first volume, The Dream of Reason, took the story from Socrates and Plato to the ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

William Boyd’s novel Restless, winner of the 2006 Costa Novel Award, describes the adventures of Eva, a young Russian émigrée, who is recruited for the British Secret Service during the Second World ...

For a relatively short book, Michel Pastoureau’s thought-provoking Green: The Story of a Color is crammed with so many intriguing facts and displays such wide and deep learning that it would be ...

Chainless souls are a bit like stray dogs; you feel sympathy for them in theory but you don’t really want to be landed with them for very long. Katherine Frank’s A Chainless Soul, the first biography ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

The cover of Paul Kalanithi’s book says it all. The front shows a view from behind of a doctor in surgeon’s mask, cap and scrubs; the reverse shows a view from the same angle of a patient in a gaping ...