More than this, he sees the assaults of the 1980s as intensely damaging not only to Oxbridge, but to British culture more ...

Lytton, daughter of the Earl of Lytton, accepted a proposal of marriage from the rising Conservative politician Gerald ...

This is the singular and spectacular trajectory of George Forster, subject of Andrea Wulf’s irresistible new biography.

Bookbindings: An Illustrated History is full of beautiful images of bookbindings from the beginnings of the codex right up to the present day. The volume’s beauty is matched by David Pearson’s ...

Readers hoping for an easy time will be alarmed by the first page of Missouri Williams’s new novel. The Vivisectors opens with its narrator, Agathe, musing on how a story can be ‘disguised’ to evade ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website.

In the autumn of 1988, the Independent magazine sent me to Estonia to report on the Kremlin’s waning power in the Soviet Baltic. Alexander Chancellor, the editor, sensed that the USSR was in trouble: ...

The Spinster Cookbook is not so much a guide to dishes to cook – the first recipe appears on page 77 and it is basically toast – as an exhortation to live the good life in a kitchen of one’s own. If ...

Early on in Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, one of the principals, John Reddan, asks the other, Frida Slattery, ‘What are you looking for?’ Frida replies, ‘The statue of Mary. There’s always one. Haven’t ...

At some point between 1820 and 1823, Francisco de Goya painted fourteen intensely dark images directly onto the walls of his country house on the banks of the River Manzanares. Now displayed at the ...

Imma Monsó is well known in Spain for her eccentric and tender novels. In her ninth, The Teacher and the Beast, the first to be translated into English, she tackles the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) ...