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 ...

Metroland is divided into three sections. In the first section, we meet Toni and Chris as schoolboys who share a devotion to the intangible values of art, and a constant desire to ‘épater le bourgeois ...

A political scientist working at Birkbeck College, London, Eric Kaufmann is ‘a quarter Latino and a quarter Chinese’. He was raised in Canada but his father’s family was of Czech-Jewish background.

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

How naïve we were in the mid-1950s. We saw Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues standing on the great Tien An Men Gate reviewing the masses and wrote of the comradeship of those who had endured the Long ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

Once you unstop your ears to its music, the siren song of the American road is hard to resist. I made my first coast-to-coast drive at the age of nineteen, setting out with a friend in my battered ...

As the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, President Trump has spread anti-Americanism more widely than at any time since the Vietnam War. Fifty years ago, Sarah ...

Taller with the Charm On - The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III by Edward Shawcross ...

British public life is sustained by a series of comforting delusions – as became very clear to me during five years writing leaders for a national newspaper, trying to reconcile the stories the ...

‘You know when you’re on one.’ That’s the working definition of a mountain that Ed Douglas gives at the start of this rich and adventurous book. While he does go on to explore more objective measures ...