At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

In late April 2012, frightened inhabitants of Timbuktu reported a ghostly figure criss-crossing the town on a white horse. He was ‘dressed all in white, with a length of cotton bound round his face in ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

Geoff Dyer, as it's by now no more than a truism to acknowledge, is a writer of rare and eccentric talents. He seldom produces anything that fits into a straightforward genre, preferring to stir ...

In 1991, the dying days of the Soviet Union, a letter arrived at the BBC’s Moscow bureau addressed to me, as the service’s Moscow correspondent, with a startling request. It was from an intrepid ...

Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...

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 ...

Although his literary works are by no means uniformly successful, Peter Ackroyd may safely be described as an author possessed of genius, and had he died before attaining middle age (like Bruce ...

Some of the finest American novels were written at least partly in the hope of effecting moral change. From Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin through The Grapes of Wrath and beyond runs a clear, ...