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.

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

This book can be read in three ways. First, it is a work of considerable scholarship and the fruit of much archival probing by a fine scholar of early Bolshevism – and much of it is fresh, exciting ...

Something terrible seems to happen to David Cornwell (alias John Le Carré) every time he leaves England or, to be generous, every time he leaves northern or eastern Europe. Give him a drizzle-sodden ...

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 ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

Ian Kershaw enters a crowded field with To Hell and Back, the first instalment of a two-volume history of Europe’s horrendous 20th century. Anyone interested in the period already has a formidable ...

It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

When she was a child, Carla Valentine used to wonder what it felt like to be a corpse. She would direct her friends to take part in funerals for roadkill they found. While her contemporaries went off ...

Geoff Dyer, as it's by now no more than a truism to acknowledge, is a writer of rare and eccentric talents. He seldom produces anything that fits into a straightforward genre, preferring to stir ...

Curiously, Margaret Thatcher seemed a more distant figure in 2013, just after her death, when Charles Moore published the first volume of his biography of her, than she does now. Then, while the ...