The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

THE JEROME SISTERS were the first wave of American beauties to marry into the British aristocracy, the precursors of a tide of 'Dollar Princesses' eager to swap cash for titles. Unlike their ...

Turnworth, in Dorset, lies hidden away to the west of Blandford Forum and south of Sturminster Newton. The most recent estimate suggests that there are thirty inhabitants. In 1861, that figure was 150 ...

Thirty years ago Conor Cruise O’Brien coined the acronym GUBU, standing for grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. He was paraphrasing a comment by the then taoiseach of Ireland, Charles ...

Even though I was around in London in the Sixties at the same time as Willie Donaldson, I never actually met him. I know of him only by reputation – for the moment when he took up a show at the ...

‘Each country has the government it deserves,’ the Savoyard writer Joseph de Maistre observed in 1811. Whether or not the French really deserved Napoleon is an interesting question, yet the remark is ...

Every so often, a book comes along that is so brilliant, it gives you goosebumps. So it was with Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s first novel. It told the story of Lee Fiora, a lower-middle-class girl from ...

MAPS ARE MUCH too important to be left to geographers and travellers. For centuries they were left to them, and treasures of incalculable value were lost as a result. We have stories of the great ...

In 1939 and for at least the next fifteen years, Peter Fleming was much more successful and famous than his younger brother Ian. He was known as an explorer and adventurer, wrote bestselling books and ...

It was in December 1939 that Cyril Connolly set up the literary magazine Horizon, which was published monthly throughout the war and its immediate aftermath, the final issue appearing in December 1949 ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...