Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

Recovering and identifying the bones of dead kings has been much in the news recently. Richard III’s skeleton was famously rediscovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012, while in 2014 fragments ...

Everybody with an interest in the everyday life of Italians under Mussolini’s dictatorship will have to read Richard Bosworth’s Mussolini’s Italy. Such a book was long overdue. Whilst we have numerous ...

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...

I once spent the night in a very small Wyoming town at the base of the Big Horn Mountains called Ten Sleep (pop 311). At the local diner I asked the young waitress about social life in Ten Sleep.

An ‘Arch-Mediocrity who presided rather than ruled’ over a ‘Cabinet of Mediocrities’ – Benjamin Disraeli’s sneering dismissal of Lord Liverpool, prime minister during the turbulent years from 1812 to ...

In the second volume of his memoirs, Messengers of Day (1978), Anthony Powell records a 1930s dinner party conversation with Dame Rose Macaulay. No, this lady remarked of some recently published novel ...

Long ago, when the Victorians were regarded as moralistic old windbags, Edward Lear, who could hardly have been less ‘serious’, was bound to seem a peripheral figure, and found himself duly exiled to ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...