Missions and Misunderstandings
A tale of two translators, caught between civilisations.
Reviews
Absolute Legend
Hunting in the archives for the ‘real’ Robin Hood.
A Revolutionary of Letters
The deft epistolary prose of Che Guevara, self-styled prophet.
Half a Life
The remarkable adolescence of the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen.
Escape to the Country
An Essex farm built on religious and political ideals in a war-torn world.
The Ghastly Truth
Selfish, shallow and snobbish? The long post-Abdication lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Y Byd Newydd
From Ohio’s farmlands to Pennsylvania’s coalfields: how Welsh is America?
Can’t Go On
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, had aimed to bring new life to a system in which he believed until the last.
Books of the Year 2021
Revolutionary France, lights out in the Ottoman Empire, gross obscenity, Napoleon’s gardens and the humble index: ten historians reflect on a year of reading.
Summer of ’59
The gruelling voting, the arduous politicking and the practical side of the 1559 papal conclave.