No star has been rising more rapidly in the critical firmament over the past decade than Mikhail Bakhtin, communist, Russian Orthodox theologian, revolutionary philosopher of language, founding father ...

Frankly, it was a triumph. Eight hundred people had gathered in the Barclays MegaCash Pavilion at the Hay Festival to hear me talk about my latest book. I was a little nervous, as I am accustomed to ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

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 ...

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 ...

ADOLF EICHMANN, AS everyone knows, was the man responsible, literally, for shipping millions of European Jews to their deaths in the extermination camps in Poland during the Second World War. He has ...

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 ...

Women are afraid of men. Not all of them, all of the time, but they know that men are capable of mixing sex and violence. Men sometimes do what women seldom, if ever do – commit rape. ‘After she was ...

Richard Holloway is the first mate who incites a mutiny, makes his fellow mutineers walk the plank, dynamites the scuppers, and takes to a lifeboat. His has been a difficult life for his shipmates.

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 ...

Everything we thought we knew about Göring is true, and more besides. He had a huge toy train set – with dive-bombing planes. He wore gaudy uniforms and medals – and togas, jewelled sandals, red boots ...

This bestselling winner of last year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is largely set in suburban Melbourne during John Howard’s recent premiership. Dozens of characters are introduced in the first ...