On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

In 1850 Elizabeth Siddal was stitching bonnets in a back room of Mrs Tozer’s millinery in Cranbourne Alley, near Leicester Square, when she was glimpsed through an open door by the young artist Walter ...

With talk of democracy in crisis plentiful, especially in Europe, a smart assessment of how well democracies have fared during past crises is badly needed. This is what David Runciman offers – with ...

‘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 ...

Having something of a yen for the place after working on Sino-Soviet affairs in Cold War days, and been banned from travelling when I was at the British Mission in Beijing during the Cultural ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. ‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’ @rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis ...

Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday. This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue. Terry Eagleton - ...

Every so often, the paper boy oversleeps, or the railwaymen, or NALGO or the civil servants go on strike, and I find myself sitting at the breakfast table with, as I usually put it on such occasions, ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

When they are bound to serve, love and obey? Should there perhaps be an option to alter the word ‘obey’ as there is in certain wedding services? Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller’s production, is the ...

One’s expectations on picking up a book on modernism from Cornell University Press are straightforward. One can expect something on Joyce and Pound, or, perhaps, Mallarmé and Lautréamont. One can ...

This fascinating book touches on several themes. It is about relations between fathers and daughters. It is set in a place that was once part of the British Empire, though one where Afrikaners called ...