‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...

‘The Indians don’t speak our language, don’t have money or culture. They’re native peoples. How did they end up with 13 per cent of Brazil’s territory?’ Jair Bolsonaro said to an audience in Mato ...

Forgive me if I sound a bit fractious, a little staccato this month; the imminent arrival of the Academy Club downstairs has subjected us to long weeks of shuddering floors and dull reverberating ...

Harry Rée was a schoolmaster almost all his adult life. He loved teaching but, as for most men of his generation, there was a gap in his career. Born in 1914, he was teaching in south London when ...

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in which he anticipated how we would spend our time a hundred years ahead. Keynes ...

Heidi Blake is a former assistant editor at the Sunday Times who now works for BuzzFeed. Her book does two things, one badly, the other well. On the positive side, Blake has written a pacy, fact-based ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

While the process by which a person becomes part of a terrorist group is different in every case, there are patterns and similarities in the ways people are radicalised. Identifying them is a big part ...

‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...