‘What leads people to spoil their environment, and what leads them to protect it?’ According to Roger Scruton, this is ‘the real question, that of human motivation’, that environmentalists have failed ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez is a tale of two devotees of the great Spanish court painter, one a 19th-century bookseller from Reading called John Snare, the other the ...

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 ...

Many years ago I knew an elderly Russian lady living in Somerset. Like many of her generation, she had undergone dramatic experiences at the time of the Revolution. One particularly frightening ...

In April 1591, six royal ships under the command of Lord Thomas Howard left Plymouth to intercept the annual Spanish flota, laden with New World treasure, off the Azores. Unfortunately for Howard, his ...

Brilliant, if presumably accidental, timing has caused this book to appear when our political life has been passing through a period of shameful disorder. The name of Clement Attlee is not much ...

In 1545, the year in which he turned seventy, Michelangelo Buonarroti completed his last public sculpture, the tomb of Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Others might have ...

‘I merely attend to the progress of my Life of Johnson’, wrote James Boswell in his journal on the eve of his fiftieth birthday in 1790. Every biographer knows that feeling: when you are in the middle ...

This magazine’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award has never shied away from speaking truth to power as well as literary celebrity. Alastair Campbell is a two-time nominee and Tony Blair was touted for an ...

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, ...

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 ...