Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

A stiff-leaf capital is a distinctive English style of carving from the early 13th century, a decorative flourish of foliage to top off a column. But although it originated in a specific time and ...

Albert Camus wrote that ‘the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain ...

They gave us Kant and Herder, Frederick the Great and Kaiser Bill; they gave us red Gothic castles and dreary country estates; they gave us Berlin and the Junkers, and when they disappeared, their ...

To the extent that ‘Calvinism’ means anything at all to the modern mind, it evokes images of Puritan witch-hunts in New England, or, perhaps, memories of stifling restrictions on leisure in a formerly ...

Loosely inspired by the case of Melita Norwood, the KGB’s longest-serving British spy, who was outed aged 87 in 1999, Jennie Rooney’s third novel is a meditation on the secrets we keep for – and from ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

While the process by which a person becomes part of a terrorist group is different in every case, there are patterns and similarities in the ways people are radicalised. Identifying them is a big part ...

I drive to Wiltshire on a rare sunny English summer’s day to interview V S Naipaul in his country home. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are to be reissued (by Picador in Britain and Knopf in ...

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 ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...