544pp. Hamish Hamilton. £25.

On the urging of a cave diver she knew, Ange Mlinko read Friday (1967), the revisionist Robinson Crusoe tale by Michel Tournier. Though she admired the novel, she was horrified at the premiss of ...

The practice of hunting with birds has existed in Eurasia for at least 4,000 years. Probably originating in the East, it spread westwards, reaching its apogee in western Europe during the Middle Ages.

The failings of Nicholas II as a ruler are widely accepted by western historians, and even by those who praise his virtues as a husband and a father. In his new history of the end of Romanov rule, ...

In May 1944, a group of young German soldiers found themselves in the Crimea, surrounded by a rampant Red Army. Facing certain death, three of them could think of no other means of escape than to swim ...

You might imagine that the title of this volume is a typo for “Pope”. But the allusion, as the South American Pontiff, or Bishop of Rome (as he prefers to be called), reminds us, some way into the ...

Can a circle, a two-dimensional object, deepen as well as enlarge? Can the façade of a church be “toothsome”? These and similar questions may occur to readers of Adrian Duncan’s third novel, The ...

The Philosophy of Translation begins with an anecdote. Damion Searls, at this point a young man pondering a career in ...

In Gaza, parents have taken to writing their children’s names on their legs in black marker pen so, if the family is ...