Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

‘Quien es?’ The last words of William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, have obsessed many people. ‘Who is it?’ is a simple enough question to ask in a darkened room where you think a friend is sleeping, ...

Something terrible seems to happen to David Cornwell (alias John Le Carré) every time he leaves England or, to be generous, every time he leaves northern or eastern Europe. Give him a drizzle-sodden ...

Reading the publisher's blurb for this novel, I'm disappointed. It promises an 'exciting new departure' from Maggie O'Farrell's previous work, the best book you'll read all year, and so on. 'Exciting' ...

In 1848, the wave of political uprisings taking place across Europe reached the Frankfurt street where the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was living, comfortably, off money from his father’s shipping ...

David Runciman has written a clever book. He seeks to show that hypocrisy is an essential part of political life. The main part of his work is an analysis of the views about political hypocrisy held ...

‘Gentle’ was the epithet most often applied to Shakespeare by his contemporaries. They seem to have meant that he was mild and self-effacing, although some of them no doubt were being sarcastic about ...

The most decisive developments of Henry VIII’s turbulent reign came in the 1530s, when the king denied the authority of the Pope, asserted his own supposedly God-given right to control the Church, and ...

Architectural publishing is not an endeavour that is routinely associated with bloated displays of machismo. Yet over the past few years there have appeared a number of books defined more by their ...

In the pantheon of Irish patriots, there are many men who can only be described as odd. To call them outsiders is merely charitable. Such men turn their backs on their caste or their religion or both.

Conflict between the forces of light and dark has long been the stuff of storytelling, but seldom is the hero a work of architecture. In effect this is what Simon Mawer has done in his engrossing new ...