Mohamed bin Laden was born in 1908 (or thereabouts) in the town of Doan in what is now Yemen. His father died when he was still a young boy and, as a teenager, he left home to find work, first in ...

In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been presented as a prototypical crusader, a paragon of religious toleration and the progenitor of a united Spain. David Abulafia goes in search of ...

I’m an avid reader of Donleavy's novels of the sexual picaresque, though I suppose that, as a femininist, I should be ashamed of myself. A new one, Schultz, and the re-issue of The Onion Eaters (1971) ...

One of my journalism professors, a gruff newspaper editor named Klaus Pohle, once posed a question about mass media that is both critical and unresolvable: where does the public interest end and the ...

Donald Trump himself and Trump-friendly elements of the US media have long promoted the legend that before turning to politics he was one of America’s greatest entrepreneurs, with a Midas touch in New ...

The American novelist Helen Phillips’s speculative thriller The Need (2019) was longlisted for the National Book Award. The technique of mixing ordinary life with futuristic elements proved so ...

At the start of Mammoth, the third novel in the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s ‘triptych’, the unnamed narrator organises a party in order to trick a man (any man) into having sex with her. She wants ...

There is a photograph of Mies van der Rohe talking to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. It was taken in May 1929 during the opening ceremony for Mies’s German Pavilion, built for that year’s World Fair in ...

A little like socks, umbrellas and spectacles, gardens have a habit of getting lost. In fact you could argue that every garden is a ‘lost garden’ in waiting. But gardens can be resilient too. Even an ...

At the age of thirty-seven William Morris went off to Iceland to reassess his life (or lives) to date. From a sunny, well-heeled childhood – his father was a bill broker who died shortly and luckily ...

Augustus the Strong’s name has long been a byword for dissipation. Yet he was also a great patron of the arts, creating in Dresden perhaps the finest Baroque city in Europe. Ritchie Robertson examines ...

In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his ...