‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

The fifties was the great decade of radio soap-opera. I myself am always very mindful of this aspect of the period since my own godmother devised and was the principal coordinating scriptwriter of Mrs ...

‘In my belly is an octopus and in it are God’s children. Living children. These are things I must not speak of.’ These are the startling words of a German judge named Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), ...

It shames me to admit that I came somewhat late to Henry James. In my adolescence I read The Turn of the Screw and, being young, largely missed the sly and appalling ambiguities of this ‘trap for the ...

While the process by which a person becomes part of a terrorist group is different in every case, there are patterns and similarities in the ways people are radicalised. Identifying them is a big part ...

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 ...

Peter Cormack’s magisterial, beautifully illustrated Arts & Crafts Stained Glass is a triumph, the culmination of prolonged research and a development of his pioneering series of exhibitions at the ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

The centrepiece of this large volume lies towards the end, and it concerns the biggest blunder made by Moscow, which came towards the end of the existence of the USSR. At Christmas 1979, the Soviets ...

‘Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.’ Surely this is one of the more famous first lines in literature, even if it is not quite as well known as Jane ...

Stephan Thernstrom, 56, a professor at Harvard University for 25 years, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars of the history of race relations in America. He has tenure. He has won prizes and ...

Sir Humphrey du Val is consigned to the lowest, worst-served place in Camelot, along with all those considered too drunk, too doddery or simply too inept to go questing. For fifteen years, he has been ...