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 ...

‘There’s a fine line between fiction and non-fiction,’ Kinky Friedman once wrote, ‘and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979.’ The wry protagonist of Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel, The Illogic of ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

THE READING PUBLIC has long been divided between those who regard Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great achievements of the post-war novel and the author as England’s answer ...

In death as in life, Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, etc, etc, marches epically on. Paddy (as he is known to nearly one and all) left us three years ago, but since then he has been commemorated ...

The death of Isabella de’ Medici, favourite daughter of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, was as squalid as her life had been glittering. She was strangled in a particularly unpleasant and elaborate way ...

Few readers, even of Literary Review, will ever match fictional geniuses like Merlin, Mycroft or Marvel’s Iron Man. But Thomas Harriot came close. He was a humbly born Oxford scholar ‘of pregnant ...

The Byzantine Empire has never had a good press, but few things in its long history have given rise to more controversy than its relations with the crusades. The First Crusade is an epic story, on a ...

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 ...

The days are long gone when philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition could airily dismiss Heidegger’s magisterial Being and Time as based on a mistake of language. His central importance in twentieth ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

In 1962, following the international success of Lolita that made him financially independent, Vladimir Nabokov gave up his professorial post at Cornell and settled in Montreux, Switzerland, where he ...