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 ...

In July 1324, Sultan Musa of Mali rocked up in Cairo, together with an entourage of over ten thousand slaves and retainers, staying as the guest of the city’s Mamluk governor as he passed through ...

Note the subtitle: ‘Half a Lifetime’. Take that, A Year in Provence. To write about la France profonde with authority, you have to put in the hours. Adam Thorpe and his family moved from England to ...

Julie Kavanagh is the ideal biographer for Rudolph Nureyev. She dispels the fog of glamour, showing the dancer and choreographer relentlessly, obsessively working. She explains clearly, but with a ...

This consistently entertaining and stimulating history of opera gets off to cracking start with a quotation from a doleful letter to The Times written in 1853 by a gentleman identifying himself only ...

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is ...

The old-style publisher’s memoir, which reached its high-water mark between about 1920 and 1950, was a relatively staid affair. The publisher who wrote it – say, Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, author ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Of all those big American novelists who emerged after the Second World War, John Updike has been the most consistent, the most productive, and probably the most pleasurable. A writer’s writer, he has ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

SALLEY VICKERS IS an audacious writer. who dares to tread where few in this apostate age would wish to venture. At a time when the Church of England is struggling to persuade its dwindling ...

In a country-wide opinion poll carried out this summer, people in the Irish Republic were asked which national political figure from the twentieth century they held in the highest esteem. The emphatic ...