The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller ...

In the summer of 1938, the attention of the world was focused on the state of Czechoslovakia. At issue was what to many seemed a deeply moral question of whether democracy or dictatorship would ...

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Taiwanese-American writer Tao Lin was a talisman of ‘alt-lit’, a kind of internet-inspired literary mumblecore. Works such as Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from ...

With his debut novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, the Guardian journalist Xan Brooks proved himself a writer of solidly constructed historical fiction. In his second book, he ...

‘Quien es?’ The last words of William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, have obsessed many people. ‘Who is it?’ is a simple enough question to ask in a darkened room where you think a friend is sleeping, ...

Butcher, Joyce Carol Oates’s sixty-forth novel, is ostensibly the story of Silas Weir, ‘Father of Gyno-Psychiatry’ to some, the ‘Red-Handed Butcher’ to others. A 19th-century doctor at the New Jersey ...

The night before Gone with the Wind’s Atlanta premiere in 1939, there was a ball at a plantation. Dressed as slaves, the children of the black Ebenezer Baptist Church choir performed for an all-white ...

Building a state takes decades of hard labour. Destroying one can be done virtually overnight. In September 2018, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, flew to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to ...

‘One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives,’ according to anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, is ‘that they dry everything up, reduce people ...

H G Wells and Rebecca West are standing in front of a bookcase, talking frantically at each other about matters of literary style, moving closer and closer until they kiss. The physicist Leo Szilard ...