Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

The Western Isles are often shrunk from the scale afforded the mainland of Britain so as to fit onto a page of an atlas. Love of Country should serve to restore spaciousness, air and attention to this ...

Spin-off biographies are dangerously tempting. Researching a major subject always reveals rabbit holes down which the biographer could happily disappear, never to rejoin the main burrow. Often it’s a ...

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 ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

During one of her summer holidays in Salzburg, Margaret Thatcher spent a day with Herbert von Karajan. The Prime Minister got on famously with the supremo of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Leading ...

Winifred Nicholson never forgot the first viewing that she and her husband, Ben Nicholson, had of Christopher Wood’s pictures. All of them were then living in Chelsea, Wood in a house that belonged to ...

Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily ...

In the years after the Second World War, during Dmitri Shostakovich’s second period of disfavour with the Soviet authorities, he wasn’t just humiliatingly wheeled out at the Cultural and Scientific ...

In a contemporary life of Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, there is a story about King John, whom the bishop knew well. The two of them were standing outside the abbey church at Fontevraud in the ...

‘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 ...

Faulques, the protagonist of this Spanish novel, is, like its author, a celebrated war photographer. However, after thirty years of jetting from one war zone to another, he’s hung up his Leica and is ...