Many years ago I knew an elderly Russian lady living in Somerset. Like many of her generation, she had undergone dramatic experiences at the time of the Revolution. One particularly frightening ...

Being a Peter Ackroyd ‘history’ or imaginative excursion down England’s most famous river, Sacred River is a book full of dreams and visions, whimsy and religiosity, and sometimes unfalsifiable and ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...

In April 1591, six royal ships under the command of Lord Thomas Howard left Plymouth to intercept the annual Spanish flota, laden with New World treasure, off the Azores. Unfortunately for Howard, his ...

You get a sense of the tone of Séamas O’Reilly’s debut novel before the action even begins. ‘To remember everything is a form of madness … confusion is not an ignoble condition,’ reads the first ...

Saul Leslie’s debut, A Working Title I Want to Change, may be the first novel ever set primarily in a Tesco superstore. It opens in October 2013, as the unnamed narrator begins his induction at the ...

Born into raffish Polish-Russian gentry in 1870, Vera Gedroits resisted convention from an early age. Passionate and rebellious, she wore cropped hair and trousers and, aged fourteen, persuaded her ...

Some of the most disagreeable people I have encountered in three decades of financial journalism work in private equity. A university acquaintance I had not seen for years once invited me for drinks ...

Twenty-five thousand years ago, a boy and a dog walked into the Chauvet cave in what is now southwestern France. The boy carried a torch, and by this light he studied the horses drawn on the walls ...

‘The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.’ Thus, more than a century ago, Lytton Strachey began Eminent Victorians. In fact, Strachey offers a model of how to ...

Having been named for her father, Louis, a mere dealer in antique tapestries, seemed insufficiently romantic to Louise Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day in 1911. She preferred the idea that her ...

The division of the peoples of the globe into ‘West’ and ‘East’ is an ancient one, as is what the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus called the ‘perpetual enmity’ between the two. As ancient ...