It’s probably the most quoted slogan in feminism and certainly among the best-known theses in all philosophy: ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.’ On the dust jacket of Kate Kirkpatrick’s incisive ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

9/11 continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary fiction, from Jay McInerney's The Good Life to Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. The Reluctant Fundamentalist tackles the subject from a ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

THE SWEET FAMILY snap of a doleful-looking little Indian boy in a party hat being held by his formally suited father on the dust-jacket of this rather strange memoir gives no warning of its ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

As Hilary Spurling writes in the second and concluding volume of her already acclaimed life of the great French painter, ‘It is not the least mysterious thing about Henri Matisse that he has had no ...

In late April 2012, frightened inhabitants of Timbuktu reported a ghostly figure criss-crossing the town on a white horse. He was ‘dressed all in white, with a length of cotton bound round his face in ...

Time Out, for instance, is characteristically anaemic. Despite its agitprop listings any pretensions to ‘alternative’ status look decidedly flimsy as it gaily retails some more Sloane Ranger jinkettes ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

JAMES I OF England (and V1 of Scotland) was probably the most complex of the Stuarts who actually reigned. If his three successors were, in broadbrush terms, a despot, a womaniser and a fool, James ...

John Gray, a political philosopher who spent much of his academic career attacking the Enlightenment, has in recent years turned his gaze on his entire species, whom he has renamed Homo rapiens. Since ...