Annan was indeed almost the beau idéal of the sort of Oxbridge figure that The Twilight of the Dons addresses. He was highly ...

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...

Longman, now part of the Pearson empire but a firm in direct descent from two members of the consortium of publishers who put up the money for Samuel Johnson’s celebrated Dictionary of the English ...

No one would have been more surprised by the fame that George Orwell has achieved than the man himself. Not widely known until the last year of his life, he is the 20th-century writer who overshadows ...

Being a Peter Ackroyd ‘history’ or imaginative excursion down England’s most famous river, Sacred River is a book full of dreams and visions, whimsy and religiosity, and sometimes unfalsifiable and ...

‘Would we have liked to live with him?’ asked Thackeray, contemplating Swift, a question he immediately ducked by supplying a long list of other writers with whom we might prefer to spend our time.

A telling French phrase to describe a girl who has lost her virginity is elle a vu le loup (‘she has seen the wolf’). This is just one of the many delectable facts waiting to be discovered in Shahidha ...

This novella is the best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years: very complex, very forceful, startling in the amount of ground it covers, and densely and intelligently put together. Though ...

Should The Lost Child have been written? This mother's tale of kicking her violent, drug-addicted seventeen-year-old son out of the family house set off a media storm earlier this year even though it ...

The flurry of exhibitions and television programmes prompted by the anniversary of the accession of George I in 1714 has looked ahead from his enthronement to the age of the Hanoverians. The ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp (1872–1938), was a cabinet minister, a Knight of the Garter and lord steward of the Royal Household. Married to Lettice Grosvenor, sister of Bendor, Duke of ...