Edward III has had a hard time of it from historians and biographers. At the beginning of this book, Ian Mortimer rightly points out the often extreme prejudice of Victorian historians against him, ...

In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

The first half of this bizarre, sometimes baffling and frequently brilliant experimental novel is set in 1982, when a young woman named Eliza arrives in Sydney from her home in rural Yass to take ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Ian McEwan is a stranger writer than he sometimes looks. Texturally (well, except maybe in the semi-farcical Solar) he’s a fastidious realist; and yet – as displayed most obviously in Sweet Tooth, ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

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 ...

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 ...

In her second novel, Mary Lawson returns to the fictional setting of her first – Crow Lake. The lake, in the far north of Canada, proves an apt metaphor for her narrative: ‘the silvery ever-moving ...

When my husband’s father was admitted to hospital with lung cancer in 1974, his doctors made no attempt to tell his family that the condition was terminal. His death came as a complete shock to his ...

Michael Burleigh is a man of formidable erudition and remarkable percipience. That he should combine these talents with a loathing of cant, hypocrisy and sentimentality has helped him to fashion an ...

This remarkable book is difficult to classify exactly. Ostensibly it is a study of the exploration of the polar regions, the history of which is rich enough in drama, suffering and pathos to fill a ...