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 ...

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 ...

In 1992, Joseph Brodsky published Watermark, a book-length essay that brings together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any other season – and a series of powerful and ...

Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and ...

No one does scandals quite like the French. It is not so much the who-did-what-and-to-whom that makes them gripping, but the tremors they seem to send through the whole society. And still they go on.

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 ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

Richard Gott’s Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt is a comprehensive and passionate denunciation of the militaristic side of imperial life. Gott narrowly focuses on a period in which ...

Unexpected discoveries are the stuff of fairy tales: the story of The Turnip Princess’s metamorphosis from dusty manuscript to Penguin Classic is almost one in itself. Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810 ...

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...

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, ...

There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...