Many Shakespeares are on the loose: romantic, imperialist, Marxist and deconstructivist ones, to name just a few. They generally don’t get on well. Another, the product of revisionist scholarship, is ...

‘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 ...

James Le Fanu is our most incisive medical journalist, and in his excellent new book he turns his attention to the dangerous and expensive phenomenon of overprescribing. We have long passed the stage ...

A lot of funny stories about Norman Mailer have reached us from across the Atlantic through the years, each one adding to the increasingly complex sum of his legend: Mailer Stabs Wife, Mailer Runs for ...

This novella is the best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years: very complex, very forceful, startling in the amount of ground it covers, and densely and intelligently put together. Though ...

England is dotted with hundreds of castles, some in ruins, some still inhabited. They remain the most romantic and popular historic buildings in the country, visited by millions every year. For ...

Medieval Death, by art historian Paul Binski, makes a creditable stab at being three different books at once. First and most appealingly, it is a coffee-table book of death for the general reader. It ...

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 ...

The Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

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 ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

In mid-2012 a picture of a young, bikini-clad Israeli soldier on a busy Tel Aviv beach, M16 assault rifle strapped to her back, went viral, attracting millions of views on the Internet. The cast of ...