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 ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

There has been a lot of Gainsborough about recently, notably the three exhibitions that ran concurrently in Bath, in Sudbury and at the National Portrait Gallery. If these have been the tip, Hugh ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

When the novelist Fanny Burney arrived at Windsor Castle in July 1786 to take up a position in the royal household as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, she found herself the object of ...

The day before the armistice on 11 November 1918, Winston Churchill told the British War Cabinet, ‘We might have to build up the German Army, as it is important to get Germany on her legs again for ...

In a contemporary life of Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, there is a story about King John, whom the bishop knew well. The two of them were standing outside the abbey church at Fontevraud in the ...

‘Personally,’ the young William Empson wrote in 1930, ‘I am attracted to the notion of a hearty indifference to one’s own and other people’s feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in question.’ ...

Sir Peter Parker sets out to disarm. He had a happy childhood, has been ‘happily in love’, all his married life and therefore has ‘no right to write an autobiography’. He boasts of knowing ‘zilch’ ...

Insularity is a professional vice among academic philosophers. It is not so much that the British read British philosophers (and some ancient Greeks), the Germans read German philosophers (and some ...

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 ...