England, tutted fifteenth-century Frenchmen, is where they kill their kings. Though the comment’s smug self-satisfaction seems a little at odds with the bloody factionalism and civil war that tore ...

Why is it, when Islamism has damaged the image of Islam so comprehensively, that the faith seems to retain a huge popularity? This paradox of a popular ugliness torments the politics of Europe, India ...

Ahead of next year’s centenary of The Great Gatsby, the inevitable revisiting of Fitzgerald gets under way. Two new ...

The whorehouse of thought” is how Claude Vignon, a journalist in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), describes newspapers.

Take the TGV from Paris to Montélimar, a local bus or two, and you could find yourself in an earthly paradise, albeit one where mortality is an abiding presence, along with a sense of the incapacity ...

It is said that after tobacco arrived from the New World in the late sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth took a discreet pull on a clay pipe before deciding against smoking. James I’s reaction was even ...

For such small fish, anchovies pack a big punch. They can be eaten on their own or as part of almost any dish, from pasta sauces to vinaigrettes. Yet for every person who loves them there will be ...