In 1991, the dying days of the Soviet Union, a letter arrived at the BBC’s Moscow bureau addressed to me, as the service’s Moscow correspondent, with a startling request. It was from an intrepid ...

It shames me to admit that I came somewhat late to Henry James. In my adolescence I read The Turn of the Screw and, being young, largely missed the sly and appalling ambiguities of this ‘trap for the ...

Edward III has had a hard time of it from historians and biographers. At the beginning of this book, Ian Mortimer rightly points out the often extreme prejudice of Victorian historians against him, ...

It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...

There are two stories about Roman Britain. One is that ancient Brits were gentle, egalitarian souls, ideologically committed to the concept of community, passionate about the arts and culture, and ...

'SKINNY D'AMATO'- THE nickname followed by the Italian surname - sounds like a Mob guy. Yet almost every American male in the first half of the twentieth century had a nickname; and there were plenty ...

Although his literary works are by no means uniformly successful, Peter Ackroyd may safely be described as an author possessed of genius, and had he died before attaining middle age (like Bruce ...

Some of the finest American novels were written at least partly in the hope of effecting moral change. From Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin through The Grapes of Wrath and beyond runs a clear, ...

Military history is a vast and popular field, ranging from rather sinister books on the Latvian SS, sold in shops run by skinheads, to works of major distinction by, among others, Antony Beevor, Carlo ...

The feminisation of Christianity, which is now clearly a feature of modern experience, seems to derive from an inclination to reinterpret religion itself as a matter of therapy and emotional ...

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 ...