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.

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

One of the most comforting facts about the tempestuous life of Thomas Paine is that he didn’t do anything of any significance until he was nearly 40. If there hadn’t been a series of revolutions and ...

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, ...

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 ...

At the age of thirty-seven William Morris went off to Iceland to reassess his life (or lives) to date. From a sunny, well-heeled childhood – his father was a bill broker who died shortly and luckily ...

Like most good writers Jeremy Lewis enjoyed the art of embellishment. He once described finding the snapped-off head of a toothbrush inside a pork pie in a pub outside Dublin. Do you think that ...

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 ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

He was born in Paddington station, became tutor to Einstein, honorary valet to the Duke of Edinburgh, and President of Ireland. He was had up for smuggling and was a musical genius. He was born in ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...