The most consulted file in the National Archive is the Jack the Ripper dossier. So much work has been done in this field we might wonder if there is anything worthwhile left to say. However, the ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

‘Florella Burney Born June the 19: 1,758: in the Parish off St Anna SoHo. Not Baptiz’d, pray Let porticulare care be take’en off this child, As it will be call’d for Again.’ The love felt by desperate ...

You might shrink from calling a leading Chinese author inscrutable, if that wasn’t the way the Chinese see him too. But Ah Cheng is as much puzzled-over in his homeland as he is widely read. At first ...

Among the Indian novelists who arrived on the world stage after the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, Amitav Ghosh has long stood out for the range and consistency of his work. Indian ...

This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter. Sign up on our website so you never miss another dispatch.

This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter. Sign up on our website so you never miss another dispatch.

Harry Rée was a schoolmaster almost all his adult life. He loved teaching but, as for most men of his generation, there was a gap in his career. Born in 1914, he was teaching in south London when ...

Medicine has lost its mojo. To be sure, the technological ingenuity of keyhole surgery is amazing, the previously inconceivable (in vitro fertilisation, curing childhood cancer) is now routine and ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter.

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first ...