We all know the true story of how Father Christmas came to be. It was the work of Siberian shamans high on ...

Bisbee was built precariously into the steep sided canyons near the Mexican border. Copper was first discovered there in 1877, and the town was named in honour of Judge De-Witt Bisbee, partowner of ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. Following its controversy-courting adaptation for the big ...

'Half a grain of morphine sulphate, a massive dose, was injected into the sick man by Dr Milton Feltenstein in the Chelsea Hotel, New York. The patient was suffering from actue confusional psychosis.' ...

Richard Aldington's translation of Laclos' novel first saw the light of day in 1924. It's hard to see why it should appear again now, without apology, under the imprint of the Open University. English ...

Emma Tennant's new novel is a crisply written magical mystery tour of childhood, the 'north' of the country becoming a metaphor for an ancestral sphere which is feud-ridden, sour, resistant to the new ...

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...

‘There’s a fine line between fiction and non-fiction,’ Kinky Friedman once wrote, ‘and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979.’ The wry protagonist of Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel, The Illogic of ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

Which structure was dubbed by Sir Walter Scott ‘half church of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot’, and was voted in a 2001 BBC poll the nation’s favourite building? Geoffrey Moorhouse’s highly ...

THE READING PUBLIC has long been divided between those who regard Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great achievements of the post-war novel and the author as England’s answer ...