Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Military history is a vast and popular field, ranging from rather sinister books on the Latvian SS, sold in shops run by skinheads, to works of major distinction by, among others, Antony Beevor, Carlo ...

In Arabia Jonathan Raban suggested that if the Arabs were to acquire a genuine contemporary literature, it would be written by women ‘because women were the only people living under the kind of strain ...

A few years ago, when I was interviewing the Argentinian tenor José Cura, he groaned at the publicity that was about to surround an exhibition of his photographs in Paris. 'I know it'll all be about ...

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the ...

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 ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

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 ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...