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.

HE WAS AN odd fellow, J L Carr. I first met hm in 1988 at a writers' conference at York University. Despite the fact that he was a celebrated novelist who had been twice shortlisted for the Booker ...

With Eisenhower’s armies closing in on Hitler’s Reich in the spring of 1945, Allied intelligence experts warned of a last-ditch stand by the Nazis in an Alpine redoubt and of a nationwide ‘Werewolf’ ...

As Meghan Markle made her way down the aisle of St George’s Chapel to marry Prince Harry, it was her painstakingly handcrafted silk tulle veil that most effectively captured Britain’s imperial past.

‘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 ...

Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology.

AT FIRST GLANCE James Holland's book looks like a tremendously serious piece of history: 400-odd pages including detailed maps; appendices with the precise figures for Hurricane and Spitfire ...

IN HIS THIRTY-FIVE years of life, Paul Nizan was a key intellectual in the French Communist Party. He published three novels, polemical essays, translations and a large quantity of militant journalism ...

'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 ...

The Gentry is a depressing title for a book, which conjures up uncharitable images. It makes me think of a hangdog Etonian, stubborn, aloof, courteous, risk-averse and mean with his money; a tall, ...

The recent early death of Mick Imlah, one of the stars of the ‘New Generation’ poets of the early 1990s, inevitably recalled the death of Michael Donaghy, another of that stellar group, in 2004 at the ...

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 ...