‘The Infant Modernists’ is one of the great unwritten works of critical biography. Shiningly specific childhood experience, the oeuvres of Woolf, Joyce and T S Eliot all insinuate, lies at the heart ...

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sprawling work of social portraiture stuffed with allusions to Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Although it is set between 1996 and 2001, its themes are urgently ...

William Finnegan makes slowcoach Donna Tartt look like Usain Bolt. He once took eight years to write a single article for the New Yorker, thus blowing her ten for The Goldfinch right out of the water.

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...

Western democracies have been living through a strange period – a suicidal period. An appropriate level of self-criticism long ago morphed into self-distrust, then into a form of self-flagellation. A ...

It is a quarter of a century since Helena Kennedy’s book Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice was published. A great deal has changed in that time, a circumstance reflected in the less equivocal ...

IN THE LAST century – under the three large-scale schemes to improve and regulate humanity led by Messrs Mao. Stalin and Hitler – many millions of innocent men. women and children were murdered.

This is not a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It is the book. Previous studies, above all the monumental and patient work of Michael Scammell, ‘will give you all the facts’ – as biographies do in ...

In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, a drama played out thousands of miles away in Beijing. Two court officials were arguing about how Italian Jesuits in China should be treated. One of these, ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

From their first recorded meeting in 1901, the lives of two of the most celebrated statesmen of the twentieth century, Lloyd George and Churchill, were inextricably intertwined. For almost fifty years ...

Peter Lanyon was forty-six years old when he died from injuries sustained while crash-landing his glider in a field in Devon in August 1964. The paintings he had completed that summer were some of his ...