The public apparition known as ‘Sir Roy Strong’ has been created partly by himself (his insistence on wearing those funny hats and drawling his exaggerated likes and dislikes on television) and partly ...

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I went to a party in Tina Brown’s rooms in Bloomsbury, and was introduced to Alexander Chancellor. I was then working for the New Statesman, correctly recollected in this ...

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

The Ten Thousand Things opens with a bookseller’s advertisement for itself, stating that it was translated from a manuscript rescued during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. And it ends with two ‘imperial ...

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 ...

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

If novels are going to be as rich in reference as Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, I do think the publishers should be encouraged to add optional reading lists at the end. Fludd is a funny, exquisitely written ...

No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction is in a dystopian decline. In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), there is plenty to object to – the mangled prose, for starters. But at least that novel holds together as ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

Even in the company of her peers – Queen Elizabeth I of England, Queen Christiana of Sweden, the empress Maria Theresa – Catherine the Great stands out as an empire-builder, a larger-than-life, ...