‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

It is not hard to understand the continuing fascination with the crimes of Jack the Ripper 130 years on. Besides the shoal of books, there is even a new museum to exploit his ghastliness. The ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...

The lives of women, both extraordinary and ordinary, and, in particular, the tension between domesticity and independence are subjects frequently revisited in the work of the novelist and biographer ...

Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily ...

Siegfried Sassoon has received almost excessive biographical attention in recent years. First up was John Stuart Roberts’s pioneering life – which paid rather too much attention to the poet’s late ...

Swedish journalist Jonas Jonasson’s second novel, The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, hurtles along with all the energy, pace and improbability of his first, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed ...

Catherine Millet is the girl who can't say 'non'. Editor of the highly-regarded Art Press, she has made it her life's work to sleep with as many men as possible (she has always, she says, had a thing ...