Nigel Biggar retired a few months ago from the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He is a notable figure in the world of moral philosophy, not only because of his ...

First published exactly seventy years ago, Sir John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 has never been out of print. Compact and clearly written, it somehow managed to encompass a ...

Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity.

‘Are you religious?’ and ‘Do you believe in God?’ are notoriously difficult questions to answer. The problem, of course, is that one is not sure what is being asked, and especially what is meant by ...

Robert Skidelsky is a distinguished economic and political historian whose first books were published in the 1960s. Many decades (and volumes) later, he has turned to giving us a warning from history ...

In 1891, Paul Gauguin arrived in Tahiti on board the Vire and, according to one witness, stepped ashore wearing a cowboy hat and un grand air de profond dédain. He could ill afford such disdain: he ...

Until I read Hermione Lee’s life of Tom Stoppard, I didn’t know it was possible to bask in envy. As if being handsome, funny and a dazzling writer (and good at cricket and fly-fishing) weren’t enough, ...

Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's anti-hero, George Smiley.

If a cow said, ‘Don’t eat me’, we wouldn’t. We seem to regard the capacity for language (by which we mean our kind of language) as evidence of moral significance. But do animals talk? Many traditions ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

‘If there is an occupation for which women are utterly unfitted, it is that of the detective,’ claimed the Manchester Weekly Times in 1888 – already behind the times, it seems, as women had been ...

Writing a history of South Asia covering a period of a century and addressing everything from politics and the family to food and Bollywood films is a monumental challenge. Joya Chatterji is ...