Saintly Networkers
Kate Cooper’s pacy tale of heroines, virgins and martyrs recounts the largely unknown role of women in shaping the early Church
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Dizzy’s Wizardry (Boris, Take Note)
Douglas Hurd and Edward Young’s witty and original biography of the former prime minister presents him as a master of self-aggrandisement
The Making of the Mahatma
Dubious racial attitudes, an obsession with excrement and sexual eccentricities: Gandhi Before India reveals the unsavoury sides of the statesman’s character
Uncritical Theorists Who Misread the Nazis
A new volume of reports by the Frankfurt School shows their number to be at best naive and at worst dangerously misinformed
Reason, Religion and the Terror
Anthony Pagden's celebration of the Enlightenment swiftly turns into a sustained, and unwarranted, diatribe against religion
Laureate of the Trenches
David Jones’s service at the front inspired an epic poem about World War I, “In Parenthesis”. Long neglected, it is ripe for rediscovery
How Seminal Was Burke?
In his biography of the statesman, Jesse Norman presents Burke as of seminal importance to today’s conservatism, and to Cameron’s government. He isn’t.
Motivation of a Masterpiece
Why did Alexis de Tocqueville write Democracy in America? Lucien Jaume’s excellent work of scholarship helps elucidate the answer by investigating the man
The Birth of the Affluent Society
David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain, the fifth of his series of histories of Britain since 1945, reveals the late Fifties to be not a time of illiberalism and repression, but of a generosity
Salad Days and Egyptian Nights
Peter Stothard’s lifelong ambition was to write a biography of Cleopatra. The charming result says as much about the author as it does about the Egyptian queen
Treacherous Path to Safety
Cruel Crossing charts the history of the escape routes in the Pyrenees used by Spanish republican, then French Jewish refugees. It is a thoughtful memorial to these brave and desperate people
ONLINE ONLY: A Lost Way of Life
Adam Nicolson's Gentry is a superb survey of the 600-year rise and fall of a class of landed Englishmen