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 ...

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 ...

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is ...

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 ...

William Trevor, the much-admired writer of more than thirty novels and collections of short stories, died in 2016. He would have been ninety this year, and to remember and celebrate him this ...

The lives of women, both extraordinary and ordinary, and, in particular, the tension between domesticity and independence are subjects frequently revisited in the work of the novelist and biographer ...

To summarise a Le Carré plot is to deflate it, for his peculiar merit is to soar above reality. Yet some explanation is needed, even if it brings the tale down to bump along the surface of the real ...

Since, so far as I can tell, all 5 million of the Literary Review’s readers – with the sole exception of myself – are writing/have written at least one book, they will know what I mean by ‘the myths ...

Graham Swift’s new work, a slim novella plainly subtitled ‘A Romance’, is deceptive in its simplicity. By its closing pages, Mothering Sunday has attained a strange grace and power. The story is told ...

For much of the last decade Muslim diaspora communities in Europe have been the subject of intense scrutiny. A spectrum of views has sprung up to explain away their seeming unwillingness, or inability ...

Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

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 ...