Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

The idea that all of us have a self – essential, irreducible and inherently valuable – is something that’s accepted across social divisions, party-political lines and ideological differences. The mere ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Happy families are, famously, not the stuff of fiction. The Cloughs, who are the subject of the prize-winning poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s second novel, are an ordinary, close-knit, middle-class family who ...

It is one of the many contentions in this lively, provocative and indeed contentious book that the order to stop the German tanks in May 1940 before they reached Dunkirk can at last be explained ...

Sir Steven Runciman’s lapidary account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, now forty years old, was a lamentation for the civilisation and the people he loved: ‘In this story,’ he wrote, ...

The Smile Jamaica Concert, scheduled for 5 December 1976, was intended as a celebration of Jamaican unity: in the National Heroes Park in Kingston, the most famous living Jamaican, Bob Marley, would ...

The original French thriller on which Andrew Lloyd Webber based his musical opens on a performance of Faust. Its star, Carlotta, sings the role of Margarita, and enraptures her adoring public until ...

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 ...

Dorling Kindersley, otherwise known as DK, was one of the greatest publishing phenomena of recent times. Springing up from nothing in a back bedroom in Kennington in 1974, it was the brainchild of ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

Sue Prideaux’s biography tells a familiar story. Born into a religious family, Friedrich Nietzsche is a brilliant young student of philology, not philosophy, and soon becomes a professor in Basel, ...