He was born in Paddington station, became tutor to Einstein, honorary valet to the Duke of Edinburgh, and President of Ireland. He was had up for smuggling and was a musical genius. He was born in ...

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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 ...

Norman Lebrecht’s writings repeatedly reveal a man-eating tiger and a fluffy pussycat. On the one hand is the fearless seeker after truth, armed cap-à-pe with finely honed but often harsh and wounding ...

The study of the ancient Persians is, as Richard Stoneman rather artfully puts it, a thriving business. So far from ruling over a ‘forgotten empire’, as a British Museum exhibition unhappily described ...

In Arabia Jonathan Raban suggested that if the Arabs were to acquire a genuine contemporary literature, it would be written by women ‘because women were the only people living under the kind of strain ...

Military history is a vast and popular field, ranging from rather sinister books on the Latvian SS, sold in shops run by skinheads, to works of major distinction by, among others, Antony Beevor, Carlo ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh and she was known to her family and neighbours as Beth, the unmarried daughter who stayed at home in Inverness to care for her widowed father. Only in the south ...

‘Always historicise!’ With this resounding imperative, Fredric Jameson opens his third major work of Marxist literary theory, of which the precursors were Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House ...

This is the first book devoted to the history of the British country house library. Mark Purcell was the libraries curator at the National Trust from 1999 to 2015, and his text is naturally arranged ...

Natalie Zemon Davis is best known for her book The Return of Martin Guerre, a study of identity and dissimulation in the late medieval world which was turned into a successful film. Trickster Travels ...