Introduction: The stately homes and England -- Prelude: Houses of taste (to 1815) -- 1. The Victorian idea of heritage -- 2. Hosts and guests: the opening of the country house -- 3. Philistines, ...

Noel Malcolm reviews The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair by Peter Mandler Of course we all know that there's no such thing as 'national character'.

The problem the 20th century had with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help was that the conjunction of ‘self’ and ‘help’ sounded too much like the opposite of the welfare state. Smiles’s creed, it was assumed, ...

In 1947, Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) unleashed his hyperbolic private eye and WWII vet, Mike Hammer, on the world with I, the Jury, a revenge saga that featured a major infusion Continue reading » The ...