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 ...

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 ...

When my husband’s father was admitted to hospital with lung cancer in 1974, his doctors made no attempt to tell his family that the condition was terminal. His death came as a complete shock to his ...

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

In this engaging and well-researched book, Ollie Randall sets out to show how cricket and literature worked in a symbiotic ...

In the capital, Tallinn, an air of indigence hung over the Soviet shops where Estonians queued hopefully for scrag ends of ...

When the American journalist Suzy Hansen first arrived in Istanbul in 2007 on a research trip for an NGO, the promise of a ...

Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century chronicler of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, memorably described the Gothic ruler Alaric as ‘a victorious leader, who united the daring spirit of a barbarian ...

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

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

Her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely loveable … one of her rare expressive looks was something to ...

Two things should be said at the start about James Hamilton-Paterson. First, he has spent much of his life shunning the UK. In a rare profile in The Guardian fourteen years ago, he spoke of leaving ...