In late April 2012, frightened inhabitants of Timbuktu reported a ghostly figure criss-crossing the town on a white horse. He was ‘dressed all in white, with a length of cotton bound round his face in ...

Faulques, the protagonist of this Spanish novel, is, like its author, a celebrated war photographer. However, after thirty years of jetting from one war zone to another, he’s hung up his Leica and is ...

A political scientist working at Birkbeck College, London, Eric Kaufmann is ‘a quarter Latino and a quarter Chinese’. He was raised in Canada but his father’s family was of Czech-Jewish background.

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

This is the most distressing work that I have reviewed in the last half-century. Yet Ray Monk has written a fine book, mastering a daunting mass of material; it is written forcefully and with great ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

‘Florella Burney Born June the 19: 1,758: in the Parish off St Anna SoHo. Not Baptiz’d, pray Let porticulare care be take’en off this child, As it will be call’d for Again.’ The love felt by desperate ...

When Daniel Farson became a television interviewer in 1956, the critics were inclined to accuse him of brutality: MR FARSON PULLS NO PUNCHES, as one newspaper headline put it mildly. In fact, the ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...

Maurice Oldfield was chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6) from 1973 to 1978. Summoned from retirement by Margaret Thatcher to become security coordinator in Northern Ireland, ...

Novels in which absolutely nothing happens are usually ‘B’ novels, those in Anthony Burgess’s memorable classification that are more concerned with meta-fictional tricksiness, problems of ...