Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society ...

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 ...

Tolerance does not come naturally to humankind. For most of recorded history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society or about the moral code was laid down by ...

A basic duty of any reviewer is to say what the work in question is about. That is something of a challenge in this case. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is obviously, and winningly, ...

He was trying, he told me, to get to ‘Ex-ee-en’, and the woman who could be just glimpsed through the tiny aperture at the Foreign Guests ticket booth simply could not understand him. Neither, ...

Marie Antoinette as few had seen her before. Perched on the edge of her seat on the way to her execution, arms bound, lank hair poking free of a decidedly unglamorous cap, David’s queen looks resigned ...

Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion ...

‘South America’, declared the North American Review in the early 19th century, ‘will be to North America what Asia and Africa are to Europe.’ ‘Not quite,’ says Greg Grandin. But also not for want of ...

It is hard to think of a person more qualified to write this book. In addition to being an art historian, a prolific writer, a lecturer and a broadcaster, James Stourton is also a former chairman of ...

During the Cold War, 260,000 lightweight copies of Animal Farm floated into eastern Europe, carried by balloons. They were part of the CIA’s huge covert operation to slip ‘cultural enlightenment’ ...

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes ...

Over recent years, a rather unusual controversy has made waves in Germany. At its centre is Prince Georg Friedrich, head of the house of Hohenzollern, the family that supplied Prussia’s kings from ...