Iris Origo's diary of the runup to Italy entering WW2 is a fascinating record which cuts through Fascist propaganda

The years 1880-1914 were just as much an Age of Improvement as an Age of Decadence

In this unnecessarily long campaign, both nationalists and unionists have peddled negative and exaggerated arguments

Book reviews of Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters translated & edited by Michael Hofmann and Three Lives, a Biography of Stefan Zweig by Oliver Matuschek, translated by Allan Blunden

The biographer of Dr Johnson's gift to posterity was to establish the latter as one of English literature's towering figures

The mawkish cult of Rabbie distracts us from the beauty of the Scottish poet's exquisite verse

A new short story

Book review of A Man of Parts by David Lodge

He is an 18th-century deist with a message for today's aggressive atheists: religion has a social value, and saves us from the return to a Hobbesian state of nature

A short story