We all know the true story of how Father Christmas came to be. It was the work of Siberian shamans high on ...

This generous collection of 154 pieces of what Brian Boyd in the introduction calls Nabokov’s ‘public prose’ – mostly uncollected and sometimes also unpublished journalism – is presented ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Back in 1749, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was intended to be among the grandest in Venice: a five-storey masterpiece of show-off architecture that would dominate its stolid neighbours and overshadow ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

Only last year, Thomas Friedman, three-times Pulitzer Prize winner and a regular columnist in the New York Times, wrote: ‘One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a ...

In 1992, Joseph Brodsky published Watermark, a book-length essay that brings together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any other season – and a series of powerful and ...

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the ...

Sharon Olds doesn’t need my good opinion; her trophy cabinet is pretty well full. Her first book of poems, Satan Says, won the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980. Her second, The Dead ...

In his preface, John Julius Norwich, author of two fine histories of the Normans in Sicily, writes: ‘The Strait of Messina is only a couple of miles across and the island is politically part of Italy; ...

When George Eliot and G H Lewes met Richard Wagner’s wife Cosima, they were instantly enchanted. Throughout the Wagners’ five-week sojourn in London in 1877, the pair enthusiastically escorted her ...