Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...

Long ago, when the Victorians were regarded as moralistic old windbags, Edward Lear, who could hardly have been less ‘serious’, was bound to seem a peripheral figure, and found himself duly exiled to ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

The defeat of Hitler in May 1945 was greeted by Spain’s tightly controlled press with extravagant eulogies of Franco, the genius who bestowed the gift of peace upon Spain. According to the Falangist ...

It is the end of harvest for a small, tight-knit community who depend on the land to survive. The poor yield should be their prime concern but one night the local manor house is set on fire, its ...

In the extensive catalogue of royal foolishness, the entry for Marie Antoinette has always bulged disproportionately large. Consort of the portly and ill–fated Louis XVI, she has been portrayed as the ...

When Daniel Farson became a television interviewer in 1956, the critics were inclined to accuse him of brutality: MR FARSON PULLS NO PUNCHES, as one newspaper headline put it mildly. In fact, the ...

‘I took my life and threw it on the skip’ begins one of James Fenton’s best poems. After which, in the manner of skip economy, ‘some bugger’ nicked it and threw his own on the skip in exchange.

To most people alive today, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was a diminutive figure in floating sweet-pea chiffon crowned by a face-framing hat, gloved hand waving from a Royal Ascot coach or ...

Stuart: A Life Backwards is a peculiar book. Billed as the story of ‘an extraordinary friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator … and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar’, it is part ...