Simon Schama's new book tells a sometimes dark history—but sounds a fundamentally optimistic note

You can find true happiness, wrote Mujir al-Din, the 15th-century historian buried on the Mount of Olives, “eating a banana in the shade of the Dome of the Rock”

Britain leads the world in publishing but lags behind when it comes to actual hours curled up with a book

An Odyssey follows Mendelsohn’s father Jay, who in his eighties decides to complete the classical education he abandoned as a teenager

The mastermind behind the shows that have defined British comedy for a generation, including Alan Partridge and The Thick of It, speaks to Sameer Rahim

Ishiguro’s writing is not limited by style or genre. Instead, what he shows us is that a great writer doesn’t need to be a great “writer”

Idealisation can serve a purpose—even in fields like physics

Hill, a great poet, passed away one year ago. Goodman talks to Sameer Rahim about coming to terms with that—and about her own extraordinary artistic output

Whitehead’s boldest stroke is to make the historical underground railroad a literal secret railway line

In our summer fiction supplement, DJ Taylor argues that angry voices of discontent rarely make it into the mainstream, while in a short story Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen follows...