Nicholas Shakespeare’s first novel since 2010 is a literary thriller set in a damp, wintry Oxford. The book’s protagonist will be familiar to Shakespeare’s regular readers: John Dyer appeared in his ...

Remembering who is who among the six Mitford sisters is not an easy task. Charlotte Mosley, meticulous editor of the present volume, whose mother-in-law was Diana (the Blackshirt Fascist ‘Cord’, ...

The English love to hate Wallis Simpson. She is vilified as the gold-digging sex goddess who stole our film-star king, Edward VIII. Hugo Vickers has spent a lifetime following Wallis. At the age of ...

Michael Millgate wrote the first version of this biography twenty years ago. It has now been extensively revised, and much material not then available has been incorporated. It is fair to call it a ...

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73) was in his day the most popular painter in Britain, and the most eccentric. His father, who figures frequently in the Farington Diaries, was the leading London engraver, ...

This is the autobiography of the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest, and return to tell the tale. His friend and comrade Tenzing Norgay was second on the rope to the summit: whether George ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

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.

HE WAS AN odd fellow, J L Carr. I first met hm in 1988 at a writers’ conference at York University. Despite the fact that he was a celebrated novelist who had been twice shortlisted for the Booker ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...