The period between the conversion of Constantine the Great in AD 312 and the accession of Theodosius II in AD 408 witnessed one of the most dramatic changes in world history. The Roman Empire, the ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...

I once spent the night in a very small Wyoming town at the base of the Big Horn Mountains called Ten Sleep (pop 311). At the local diner I asked the young waitress about social life in Ten Sleep.

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

In Berlin at the end of the 1920s, a set of fake Van Goghs sent the art world reeling. The paintings had passed through the hands of Otto Wacker, an obscure Berlin art dealer, and had long been ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

The ‘Tyger’ of my title cannot be unfamiliar to the readers of the Literary Review. Prof. Miner, however, needs a brief introduction. He is Professor Paul Miner, a literary scholar, who is reported to ...

Buffs of Catcher In The Rye will remember that novel's test of a good novel: if reading it makes you want to telephone the writer like a friend. Holden Caulfield, at large in the universe of the ...

In his introduction to Eminent Edwardians Dr Piers Brendan tells us his work 'follows Strachey's pattern and attempts to unlock an age by means of a few key figures' whose "eminence was global".' He ...

'Poets make the best topographers', W. H. Hoskins has said, with Wordsworth in mind, and Margaret Drabble's fine survey of British landscape as seen through literary eyes from Celtic times until our ...

The eponymous well heeled juvenile duo whose adventures make up the core of this new American film accept without question the wealth that quite obviously surrounds them – luxurious apartments in a ...