Many hearts sank when in August last year the Italian government gave its approval to the building of the world’s longest suspension bridge across the Strait of Messina. Carrying two railway lines at ...

Remembering who is who among the six Mitford sisters is not an easy task. Charlotte Mosley, meticulous editor of the present volume, whose mother-in-law was Diana (the Blackshirt Fascist ‘Cord’, ...

Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

Twelve years ago Julia Blackburn and her husband moved into a house high up in the mountains near the Ligurian coast, within hiking distance of the Italian border with France. It is an inaccessible ...

In 1939 and for at least the next fifteen years, Peter Fleming was much more successful and famous than his younger brother Ian. He was known as an explorer and adventurer, wrote bestselling books and ...

This is not a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It is the book. Previous studies, above all the monumental and patient work of Michael Scammell, 'will give you all the facts' – as biographies do in ...

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

This is the autobiography of the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest, and return to tell the tale. His friend and comrade Tenzing Norgay was second on the rope to the summit: whether George ...

Cleaner, babysitter and general dogsbody Agnès Morel has been a fixture in the cathedral town of Chartres for twenty years. Surrounded by gossipy old mesdames, priests who doubt their vocation and an ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

Stuart: A Life Backwards is a peculiar book. Billed as the story of ‘an extraordinary friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator … and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar’, it is part ...