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Diana Mansergh, editor. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. £15.99/495 Rupees. 274 pages. ISBN 0199564847-1. Nicholas Mansergh (1910-1991) is perhaps best remembered for his work on Irish history but he also [...]

Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. Part III. Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond, editors. Oxford University Press. £65.00. ciii + 319 pages. ISBN 0-19-722423-7. The publication of this [...]

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Nicholson Baker. Vintage. £7.99 p.b. 370 pages. ISBN 0-099-42903-9. Any library reader who has had to cope with the horrors of microfilm [...]

Edmund Spenser: Selected Letters and Other Papers. Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zureher, editors. Oxford University Press, [pounds sterling]125.00. lxvii + 292 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-955821-6. Edmund Spenser's place in the English [...]

Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century: Parts I and II. Norman Davis, editor. Oxford University Press for The Early English Text Society. Part I: 1xxxvii + 671 pages. [...]

Rosalind E. Krauss. Thames & Hudson. 192 pages. £17.95. ISBN 0-500-23761-1. On seeing a clever forgery of his work, Picasso quipped, 'I often paint fakes.' In truth, Picasso looked at [...]

Tony Benn's two page foreword in his diaries, letter and papers provides a clue to an understanding of him. He is unashamedly ambitious, prone to conversion in which he dismisses [...]

Editor's Note: The horrific terrorist attacks against London last month are yet further brutal reminders of the problems a civilised country faces when assaulted by savage and indiscriminate killers. Attempts [...]

STANLEY BALDWIN IN HIS OWN WORDS Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman, 1908-1947. Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin, editors. Cambridge University Press. £75.00 (US$130.00). xxii + 526 pages. ISBN 0-521-58080-3. Stanley [...]

FOLIO, a sheet of paper which is folded in half, making two leaves or four pages. Fold it again and you have a quarto, with one sheet supplying eight pages. [...]

FROM time to time the British media is set in a frenzy when private papers figure on the auction circuit, or are re-discovered, appearing to 'prove' yet again that Queen [...]

ROBERT Mugabe, the re-elected President of Zimbabwe, is the classic example of what people mean when they describe somebody as overeducated. He is, on paper, probably the most highly qualified [...]

George Wedd In July 1998, the Labour Government produced, after fourteen months' gestation (the same period as for an elephant) a White Paper entitled A New Deal for Transport: Better [...]

Iraq's Future: The Aftermath of Regime Change. Toby Dodge. Routledge for the International Institute of Strategic Studies. £12.99 p.b. 72 pages. ISBN 0-415-36389-6. This Adelphi Paper (No. 372) accepts that [...]

Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda. Roy Greenslade. Macmillan. £30.00. 787 pages. ISBN 0-333-78311-5. 'No paper', Lord Beaverbrook said back in 1947, 'is any good at all for [...]

Like many writers, Hardy feared his biographers. We can but guess at the private papers he had destroyed on his death. It was his duty as a writer to confront [...]

Cabinets and the Bomb. Peter Hennessy, editor. Oxford University Press for the British Academy. £19.95 p.b. 368 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-726422-5. This is the second of the Academy's Occasional Papers and [...]

Leviathan after 350 Years. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau, editors. Clarendon Press, Oxford. £40.00. x + 308 pages. ISBN 0-19-926461-9. This collection of twelve papers, from scholars in Britain, France, [...]

European Integration and Political Conflict. Gary Marks and Marco R. Steenbergen, editors. Cambridge University Press. £45.00 (US$75.00) xiv + 280 pages. ISBN 0-521-53505-0. The eleven papers in this collection began [...]

A man cried out as loudly as he could, This was a city he could live without. Inside the carriage, suddenly he stood, Screwed up his paper, furiously got out. [...]

THE COMMANDER of the death-squad personally responsible for the murder of Miklos Radnoti--perhaps the greatest poet of the Holocaust well known in English translation--escaped retribution for the deed. His remains [...]

'FINLAND Tops Global Prosperity Index'. That headline, in an influential British newspaper on 26 October 2009, would have had the Finnish political elite downing champagne by the magnum. Since the [...]

WHILE the remains of the Christmas turkey yet linger in British refrigerators, the television screens will suddenly be full of advertisements for package summer holidays to various sunny climes. In [...]

AFTER three decades of reform in China, the level of urbanization has increased substantially. In 2006, China's national urban population was over 577,000,000, with a national urbanization rate of 43.9 [...]

OFTEN, the books that really influence us are neither the bearers of profound ideas nor works of any great literary accomplishment. They are, rather, those accidental volumes that just happened [...]

WITH pubs and churches, post offices and local shops throughout Britain closing, the decline of the local community is often proclaimed as an undeniable fact and a matter of deep [...]

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS leads this issue's survey of recently published paperbacks with the second volume of A New History of Ireland: II Medieval Ireland 1169-1534 (£30.00) edited by Prof. Art [...]

THE imaginative bounds of radio are infinite space. David Mamet has challengingly declared that all radio drama needs is a microphone and the basic means of recording sound. Our age [...]

In his day Rudolf Nureyev was not just a famous ballet dancer but a household name. In Rudolf Nureyev: The Life (£9.99), published by PENGUIN BOOKS, Julie Kavanagh, ballet critic [...]

THE Winter exhibition of Regency watercolourists at the Courtauld Gallery reminded one that Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28) merits more attention than he is at present paid. He stands out even [...]

SCRATCH below the surface and there is usually an element of tragedy in the life of every creative artist--unfulfilled dreams, thwarted plans, intractable problems, too many roads not taken. But [...]

THE world has been shocked as the spectre of a 'New Cold War' has been raised by Russia's August invasion of Georgia's break-away regions. Former Soviet states are feeling particularly [...]

The works of the late Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, continue to pour forth from his various publishers of whom JOHN MURRAY is perhaps the foremost. The latest includes a [...]

BIG is not necessarily beautiful, but the current agendas of both the European Union and NATO is one of steady aggrandizement. The more members each can take, it would seem, [...]

PENGUIN BOOKS have brought out an impressive range of titles devoted to recent history. First we have Prof. Sir Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940-1941 [...]

FASHIONS in art and architecture go as regularly as they come. There is a certain charm about a form that has a starting-point and a closure; I think, for example, [...]

THE concept of evil, long devalued, derided, and dismissed by psychiatrists and psychologists, seems to have undergone a measure of re-evaluation. The prolonged contemplation of certain varieties of some mass [...]

IN his song 'Finland' Monty Python's Michael Palin summarised the country of lakes and forests as 'so sadly neglected and often ignored'. This country of 5.3 million people is the [...]

'COMETH the hour, cometh the man'. The hour is now, the consideration is that the Mediterranean as a region requires the same political dynamic as the European mainland after Year [...]

L' Eglise a deux genres d' ennemis; le premier la persecute, le second s' en detourne. Le second est le plus fort Julien Green Poor Mexico, so far from God [...]

THE Royal Academy's sumptuous exhibition, Cranach, has been an occasion for rejoicing. It is the largest display of the pictures of Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) ever seen in this [...]

THE British government found itself paying attention to the cinema industry from an early stage. Answering a Parliamentary Question on juvenile crime the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, told the [...]

IT seemed a bold move on the part of the British Council to try reopening its offices in Ekaterinburg and St Petersburg after the end of the Russian New Year. [...]

VINTAGE BOOKS have brought out a cornucopia of new biographical and historical titles. On the biographical side we have The Life of Kingsley Amis (£11.99) by Prof. Zachary Leader which [...]

IT is a tribute to the French painter, Antoine Watteau, that there are more of his works in public collections in London than in Paris: fourteen in London, twelve in [...]

ONE of the most famous works of the great Belgian painter Rene Magritte looks like a clear representation of a pipe and bears the title Ceci n'est pas une pipe. [...]

LAST year, as every year, I went rather wearily to the school Nativity play. And last year, as every year, the same story was told. An angel in a white [...]

ACCORDING to a recent French study we--all of us--do everything much faster than our ancestors did. We not only travel faster, more frequently and generally further, but walk, talk, shop [...]

ALL government statements and statistics about crime are a minefield for the British public. They are more often intended to mislead than inform. The recent announcements by Whitehall about the [...]

THE declared view of the Bush Administration is that North Korea is a rogue state with a record of terrorism. It abandoned a 1994 agreement with the Clinton Administration to [...]