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 ...

Few of the notorious haunted houses in fiction are occupied on the basis of annual contracts overseen by a letting agent: usually it is precisely these houses’ unregulated status that has allowed ...

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 ...

When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much. Scouting around Penzance for a suitable studio-cum-domicile following the breakdown of her marriage in 1947, she chanced, as ...

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, ...

Part-way through Natasha Brown’s new novel, Universality, Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist who recently managed to climb out of the penurious doldrums of lockdown with a long read that went ...

A man’s home is supposed to be his castle. But for a woman, home can be a place of intense danger and violation to both bodily and mental autonomy. What if violence, abuse, poisoning and betrayal lurk ...

A contribution to Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, The Many Lives of Anne Frank is part biography, part history and part literary and cultural criticism. The first half of the book tells ...

272pp. University of California Press. £30 (US $35). C. Marina Marchese The world of honey is far richer and more varied than the pallid jars sold in supermarkets would suggest. There’s black honey, ...