'If Susan Sontag had been a man, if she hadn’t had such a pungent, fascinating character, if she hadn’t had a nonstandard sexuality, would her works get her a biography as big as this one? Does she merit it?'

'Margaret Thatcher was a leader they had never wholly accepted; a radical, an outsider, a loner'

Questioning the status of history’s ‘most dangerous’ spy

Thomas Grant's "Court Number One" reveals the changing values of the society which the criminal justice system ultimately exists to enforce

'An ominous development in the “unsettling” of Europe is the increasing restriction on what may be said about migration, and the increasingly strict policing of language'

How usury killed Christendom

Noel Malcolm tells the story of western intellectual fascination with the Ottoman empire from the fall of Constantinople in 1453

"Though de Beauvoir and Sartre never tied the knot, their relationship, with its jealousies and enmities and silent rages, looks like the worst kind of marriage"

"Heidi Tworek’s shrewd, erudite and timely News from Germany is a work of historical analysis that can also be read as a corrective to the dangerous hysteria over the information games—fake news and all the rest—currently being played over the internet."

"How could one of the most civilised societies on earth become the instrument of a mind of such malice? I confess that my heart sank at the thought of spending any more hours in the company of this personification of radical evil. Yet we cannot wholly avert our eyes"