What is it about the Homeric epics that makes them resound through our culture like the waves of the wine-dark sea? We know very little about ‘Homer’ – theories abound, as they do about Shakespeare, ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

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.

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...

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 ...

No one who was in Paris on 7 January 2015 will ever forget the fear and horror that coursed through the entire city that day. This was the date of the massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine ...

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Neel Mukherjee’s third novel is made up of five narratives and the book’s architecture is revealed gradually: the odd-numbered sections are linked to each other, as are the even-numbered ones. Any ...

Halford Mackinder is not much read these days. The British geographer and imperialist’s emphasis on the enduring strategic and political importance of the earth’s physical features and resources ...

Oswald ('Tom') Mosley was the Lucifer of twentieth-century British politics. Blessed with every apparent advantage – wealth, good looks, charisma, courage and ambition – he was the youngest MP in ...

How naïve we were in the mid-1950s. We saw Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues standing on the great Tien An Men Gate reviewing the masses and wrote of the comradeship of those who had endured the Long ...