Louis XV had a problem with Paris. Until the late 1740s, he had regularly visited the capital on his way from Versailles to his favourite hunting grounds in the forest of Compiègne. But over the ...

In 1545, the year in which he turned seventy, Michelangelo Buonarroti completed his last public sculpture, the tomb of Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Others might have ...

Metroland is divided into three sections. In the first section, we meet Toni and Chris as schoolboys who share a devotion to the intangible values of art, and a constant desire to ‘épater le bourgeois ...

Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...

'Poets make the best topographers', W. H. Hoskins has said, with Wordsworth in mind, and Margaret Drabble's fine survey of British landscape as seen through literary eyes from Celtic times until our ...

This exceptional book is billed as garden writing, but it is garden writing only in the sense that Moby-Dick is a treatise on whales. There is no need to have the slightest knowledge of or interest in ...

The eponymous well heeled juvenile duo whose adventures make up the core of this new American film accept without question the wealth that quite obviously surrounds them – luxurious apartments in a ...

An Englishman's first visit to New York may well be a bewildering experience; but to make such a visit while attending his first American Musicological Society Conference could cause him to lose all ...

In his introduction to Eminent Edwardians Dr Piers Brendan tells us his work 'follows Strachey's pattern and attempts to unlock an age by means of a few key figures' whose "eminence was global".' He ...

It was the death of Auberon ('Bron') Waugh nearly three years ago that led his son Alexander to investigate the relationships between fathers and sons over five generations of his family. Alexander ...

I once asked a former Oxford classics don which verse translation of Homer he thought was best. He shrugged before saying, ‘Read Homer in Greek, or else in prose.’ On the face of it, this looks like a ...

Many years ago I knew an elderly Russian lady living in Somerset. Like many of her generation, she had undergone dramatic experiences at the time of the Revolution. One particularly frightening ...