Sometime in the 1930s, a wealthy Argentinian matron was strolling in the park of Palermo, in downtown Buenos Aires, when she suddenly noticed an old beggar woman. A notable feature of the park is its ...

The relationship between mother and daughter is probably the most insidious, powerful, elaborate and devastating connection known to woman. (It can, of course, alternatively be the most powerful, ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

Laura Freeman’s memoir of her teenage years and her early twenties, The Reading Cure, recounts her fight with anorexia. But it is not so much a diary chronicling the painful stages of the illness as ...

Fran Lebens: Paperbacks - Mailman by J Robert LennonA failed marriage, an incestuous relationship, an obsession with pornographic material and other people's letters, an abortive attempt to improve ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...

Retired politicians have cornered the market in biographies of great leaders. These books annoy historians because they pinch their research and sell more copies. They tend to be uncritically admiring ...

Over 150 years after her birth, 109 years after mounting the British throne alongside her husband, George V, sixty-six years after her death, Mary of Teck has gone viral. Until the publication last ...

Midnight at the Pera Palace is a vibrant, entertaining and dazzlingly original social history not only of the city of Istanbul at the dawn of the modern era, but also of the many worlds that ...

Piers Brendon: ‘Kill the Bolshie. Kiss the Hun’ - Operation Unthinkable: The Third World War – British Plans to Attack the Soviet Empire, 1945 by Jonathan Walker ...

This proved a difficult book to read: put down for a moment it was appropriated by someone else and thereafter continued to journey furtively about the house, pursued by frustrated readers. Treat it ...