A film-centric portrait of the extraordinarily gifted movie director whose decades – long influence on American popular culture is unprecedented. "Everything about me is in my films", Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding t...

Rene Descartes is best known as the man who coined the phrase "I think, therefore I am". But though he is remembered most as a thinker, Descartes, the man, was no disembodied mind, theorizing at great remove from the worldly affairs and concerns of h...

Every book has a story of its own, a path leading from the initial idea that sparked it to its emergence into the world in published form. No two books follow quite the same path, but all are shaped by a similar array of market forces and writing  cr...

Confiscated by Soviet authorities in the 1950s, the diaries of Ivan Maisky, the USSR's ambassador to Great Britain from 1932 to 1943, have been unearthed, annotated, and edited for publication in a three-volume set that Niall Ferguson predicts "will...

Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932) rose from modest means as the son of a peddler to meteoric wealth at the helm of Sears, Roebuck. Yet his most important legacy stands not upon his business acumen but on the pioneering changes he introduced to the practic...

Philo was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who left behind one of the richest bodies of work from antiquity, yet his personality and intellectual development have remained a riddle. Maren Niehoff presents the first biography of Philo, arguing that hi...

Erwin Rommel was a complex man: a born leader, brilliant soldier, a devoted husband and proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant. In France in 1940, then for two years in North Africa, then finally...

Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most intriguing characters to emerge during the Civil War. There are no shortage of books and articles on the man and his generalship, with topics ranging from hero worship based on his extraordinary battlefield...

The Fieseler Storch is the most famous slow-speed aircraft of the Second World War. A remarkably versatile reconnaissance plane, as well as a Nazi showpiece and diplomatic gift – and even, in post-war British hands, a tool in helicopter design – it w...

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy became one of the most famous army chaplains of the First World War, earning the nickname "Woodbine Willie" because of his habit of giving out both cigarettes and bibles to the men at the front. During the war he also earned...