Into the vortex of Widmerpool
"Everyone has their Widmerpool . . . Who is your Widmerpool? — awesomely, whose Widmerpool are you?"
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Liberalism’s identity crisis
The American Left has taken refuge in an intellectual dead end, argues Mark Lilla
Only connect
Niall Ferguson's big theory of history is stimulating, arresting, but only half-convincing
Old Spanish customers
Some of the Iberian treasures bought by Victorian collector John Bowes can now be seen in London
The Princess and the Poet
An inscription in an old book is the clue to a lost world of literary salons and love affairs
Heartless Hero for the Hipster Generation
It is a fact that a high proportion of unreliable narrators of novels are intelligent, arrogant, badly-behaved, young males.
Deep History Or Just Conspiracy?
Built on misreadings and deceptive elisions, Nancy MacLean's Democracy In Chains reframes the colourful tale of the American Right as a dank, dark conspiracy
Gullible Guests of the Nazis
Julia Boyd's meticulously-researched Travellers in the Third Reich shows visitors to Hitler's Germany saw only what they wanted to see
Romantic Revolutionary
James Hamilton's biography of Thomas Gainsborough offers a portrait not just of the artist but also of the worlds he moved through
Hinterland of a Recluse
Jasper Johns is the J.D. Salinger of contemporary art, whose gnomic work defies easy categorisation
Opposites meet in the land of Scrugletopia
The debate between Sir Roger Scruton and Terry Eagleton enhances our national discourse
Home from home for the Bolshevik elite
Yuri Slezkine's The House of Government tells the story of a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die