Clarissa Churchill is the niece of one prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the wife of another, Anthony Eden, who succeeded Churchill. From this you might deduce that she is a political groupie and ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

‘Characters migrate.’ New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip takes this aphorism from Umberto Eco as its epigraph and it has multiple resonances in his novel. The thirteen-year-old narrator Matilda’s ...

At the end of this massive, balanced and without doubt enduring biography of Thomas Cranmer the reader is still left wondering what he really believed. A small clue to his final theological position ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

Political biography is a difficult art. Too often the central figure becomes obscured by the politics, lost against the vastness of his or her historical circumstances. Another danger lies in the ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

A C Grayling has carved out a niche not only as a lucid and accessible interpreter of philosophy for the general reader but also as a passionate advocate for the role that it can and should play in ...

Conflict between the forces of light and dark has long been the stuff of storytelling, but seldom is the hero a work of architecture. In effect this is what Simon Mawer has done in his engrossing new ...

The Murderess was first published in 1902 (this translation by Peter Levi appeared in 1983), and is widely acknowledged to be the masterpiece of Greek novelist Alexandros Papadiamantis. It is a sad ...

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 ...