True Believers - Sunrise by Téa Obreht ...

The death of Isabella de’ Medici, favourite daughter of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, was as squalid as her life had been glittering. She was strangled in a particularly unpleasant and elaborate way ...

In a 1906 letter, the physicist Pierre Curie wrote: ‘In my opinion, there is here a whole domain of completely new facts and physical states of space about which we have had no conception.’ Few ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

All the Write Stuff - A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...

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 ...

In 2014 he wrote Napoleon the Great, which made the case for bracketing his subject with Alexander, Peter and Frederick. That was a full biography which portrayed Napoleon in action, both on the ...

The Old Ways is ‘the third book in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart’, the other two being Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. They offer a lucid and often beguiling mix of ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...