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 ...

'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 ...

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

Few readers, even of Literary Review, will ever match fictional geniuses like Merlin, Mycroft or Marvel’s Iron Man. But Thomas Harriot came close. He was a humbly born Oxford scholar ‘of pregnant ...

The death of Isabella de’ Medici, favourite daughter of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, was as squalid as her life had been glittering. She was strangled in a particularly unpleasant and elaborate way ...

It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...

In his preface, John Julius Norwich, author of two fine histories of the Normans in Sicily, writes: ‘The Strait of Messina is only a couple of miles across and the island is politically part of Italy; ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

The Byzantine Empire has never had a good press, but few things in its long history have given rise to more controversy than its relations with the crusades. The First Crusade is an epic story, on a ...

Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimean War, is one of the icons of British history – the Lady with the Lamp serenely gliding through the hospital wards, the sick and wounded soldiers kissing her ...

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 ...