Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

‘Florella Burney Born June the 19: 1,758: in the Parish off St Anna SoHo. Not Baptiz’d, pray Let porticulare care be take’en off this child, As it will be call’d for Again.’ The love felt by desperate ...

Political biography is a difficult art. Too often the central figure becomes obscured by the politics, lost against the vastness of his or her historical circumstances. Another danger lies in the ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...

In this book on the eighteenth-century designer William Kent, Tim Mowl recalls how he ‘outed’ Horace Walpole in a lecture to the Georgian Group: ‘A number of ladies walked out in protest. It was not ...

In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, a drama played out thousands of miles away in Beijing. Two court officials were arguing about how Italian Jesuits in China should be treated. One of these, ...

THIS IS A riveting, and yet also disturbing, book. On one level it’s a study of the Islamic Republic of Iran since the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy by frenzied mobs in 1979. On another level, ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

Nearly thirty years have passed since Edward Said published Orientalism. That book shifted the intellectual climate – more exactly, degraded it – by propagating a new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed ...

In her second novel, Mary Lawson returns to the fictional setting of her first – Crow Lake. The lake, in the far north of Canada, proves an apt metaphor for her narrative: ‘the silvery ever-moving ...

Most great British institutions had a ‘bad’ Bosnian war. John Major’s Conservative government resolutely refused to intervene to prevent ethnic cleansing, and stopped the Americans from doing so for ...

When W T Stead drowned on the Titanic, Lord Northcliffe paid tribute to the ‘great revolution which he effected in journalism’. If Northcliffe – founder of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror – ...