Early in 1943, Maria Mandl, the tyrannical, sadistic unofficial head guard at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided that the moment had come to form a women’s orchestra. Fiercely jealous of her male ...

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170 after seven years of bitter quarrel with his old friend Henry II, is one of the most well-known and well-documented figures ...

On stage, Harriet Walter always conveys sharp intelligence and humour, which is equally characteristic of her books Other People’s Shoes (1999) and Brutus and Other Heroines (2016). In those books ...

I used to like Elon Musk. There’s an openness to him, an unguarded transparency. While other technoligarchs remodel as Augustus Caesar (Mark Zuckerberg) or a curiously buff Jean-Luc Picard (Jeff Bezos ...

Until recently, the prime minister was the most important person in British politics. But when the New Statesman published its annual list of the most powerful people on the left in June last year, ...