Having been named for her father, Louis, a mere dealer in antique tapestries, seemed insufficiently romantic to Louise Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day in 1911. She preferred the idea that her namesake was Louise Michel, ‘the red virgin of Montmartre’, an anarchist heroine of the Paris Commune. It wasn’t true, of course, but ... read more

A phrase like ‘fortress England’ seems to echo down the centuries, and turns up again in This Little World, Nandini Das’s new study of identity and belonging, cross-border migration, assimilation and estrangement in the period between 1500 and the restoration of Charles II. Das seeks to unmask the period’s most fundamental assumptions about English ... read more

Twenty-five thousand years ago, a boy and a dog walked into the Chauvet cave in what is now southwestern France. The boy carried a torch, and by this light he studied the horses drawn on the walls many years earlier by Palaeolithic fingers. The dog stayed close. In fact, as Thomas W Laqueur recounts, its pawprints appear on the limestone floor ‘only where there is art to be seen’. We are at this point in the ... read more

I once saw Mary Soames, Sir Winston Churchill’s youngest daughter, curtsy to the Duke of Gloucester. She performed a deep, sweeping genuflection worthy of a professional ballerina and, considering that she was about eighty at the time, I congratulated her on the feat. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘my family has always paid due homage to royalty.’ This was certainly true of her father, who revered the institution of monarchy as ‘the crowned ... read more

Some of the most disagreeable people I have encountered in three decades of financial journalism work in private equity. A university acquaintance I had not seen for years once invited me for drinks on the terrace of his vast Thames-side apartment, only to demand that I lean on a colleague to kill an inconvenient story. The husband of another acquaintance ... read more

‘Make your own kind of music,’ Cass Elliot exhorted us in her joyful ode to being true to yourself, and it could easily serve as the motto for Lauren Elkin’s new book, Vocal Break. Although we think of singing as the natural expression of our true personalities, it is in fact nothing of the sort. Especially, it turns out, if we happen to be women. The vocal break is what happens when the voice changes register, from ... read more