The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350’ at the National Gallery in London until 22 June is therefore trailblazing, as well as being ...

How can a business that generates more losses than profits not only survive but thrive? Easily, as long as the losses fall on economic actors outside the company. It wouldn’t be good for the economy ...

How many geniuses of the front rank have excelled equally in two creative fields? There’s William Blake, of course, and perhaps Michelangelo qualifies on the grounds of his marvellous sonnets, but no ...

Between 1933 and 1940, about a hundred thousand refugees from central Europe came to Britain to escape the nightmare of fascism. They were mostly from the professional middle class. The majority were ...

A room full of women sleeping in low beds, heavily sedated with drugs and given frequent electric shocks, sounds like something from a Soviet gulag. Such a place could in fact be found near Waterloo ...

Last Post - The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting by Robert Irwin ...

But during the Great Purge he was arrested and tortured; he confessed to having worked undercover for Russia’s enemies and ...

Early in the 19th century, there were some 260,000 of them across Britain’s naval and merchant fleets. People called them Jacks, but they are mostly nameless – or nameless to history. Even on ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

Some time before 1973, when Richard Crossman was still editor of the New Statesman, I ambled along to Mr Benn’s substantial residence in Holland Park. My purpose was to talk to him about his proposed ...

Well, how do you read the Literary Review? One review a day? As they come? Picking one anywhere, lured by the title, or the picture, or just the way the pages fall open? Numbers in the Dark is an ...