Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

The flurry of exhibitions and television programmes prompted by the anniversary of the accession of George I in 1714 has looked ahead from his enthronement to the age of the Hanoverians. The ...

Thomas More, as Joanne Paul observes in the opening sentence of this entertaining and thought-provoking new biography, is ‘one of the most divisive figures in English history’. The incorruptible hero ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of ...

Being a Peter Ackroyd ‘history’ or imaginative excursion down England’s most famous river, Sacred River is a book full of dreams and visions, whimsy and religiosity, and sometimes unfalsifiable and ...

Ian McEwan is a stranger writer than he sometimes looks. Texturally (well, except maybe in the semi-farcical Solar) he’s a fastidious realist; and yet – as displayed most obviously in Sweet Tooth, ...

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 ...

What makes Roger Scruton so distinctive a figure on the British intellectual landscape is the extraordinary range of his interests and sympathies – aesthetics, architecture, farming, hunting, ...

‘Life Writing’ is all the rage nowadays, and two reasons suggest themselves. We live in a narcissistic, egalitarian age in which self-expression is seen as a virtue and a right; and technology not ...

The Oxford Book of English Prose, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared in November 1925, exactly twenty-five years after The Oxford Book of English Verse. The immense success of the latter, ...