I have recently chosen exhibition catalogue as books of the year, honouring a neglected genre. This year catalogues have tended to be substitutes for the original show, rather than souvenirs. I didn’t ...

544pp. Little, Brown Spark. £30. The death of God, announced by Nietzsche in the 1880s, is still proving to be traumatic. In contrast, the death of Economic Man will be a balm to the soul. When the ...

The Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was looking for a drug to stimulate circulation when he set out to synthesize the various molecules in the alkaloids produced by ergot – a fungus once used by midwives ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

Susannah Gibson’s new book is a biographical history of the women who formed and hosted some of the most famous London salons in the eighteenth century. Following work on this subject by Norma Clarke, ...

In 1942 the real estate magnate and philanthropist Alfred Knight purchased a copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles in its second, expanded edition (1587). He was building a collection of rare books ...

and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limned through screens over-pinging with messages. cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...

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Paris was never really Camus’s cup of tea, and certainly not when, newly arrived there in the spring of 1940, he was living in a drab hotel room in Montmartre and doing humdrum secretarial work at the ...

I went to Wharton with Donald Trump. We were both from praetorian families in Queens – his more martial than mine – in the first line of defense on the crabgrass frontier. We went out one night ...

The expression “Don’t get me wrong” is a good place to start – an ethical mandate as well as a critic’s dictum. In its efforts to enforce informality while insisting on the possibility of estrangement ...