Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel begins confidingly: You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles ...

"WHAT WE CALL the heart", said Sidonia, "is a nervous sensation, like shyness, which gradually disappears in society. It is fervent in the nursery, strong in the domestic circle, tumultuous at school.

HOW MANY LIVES of Marilyn Monroe do we actually need? On my shelves alone there are six major biographies, not counting books entirely devoted to the rumours surrounding her death; and now, opening on ...

The vanished ocean at the heart of this book formed a little over 250 million years ago as the last supercontinent, Pangaea, slowly assembled. At that moment, nearly all the Earth’s landmasses were ...

Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and ...

The most decisive developments of Henry VIII’s turbulent reign came in the 1530s, when the king denied the authority of the Pope, asserted his own supposedly God-given right to control the Church, and ...

It is important to be reminded from time to time of the strength of the radical, non-conformist element in Victorian society, so influential and so far from the ‘Victorian values’ of comfortable ...

When the wife of King Minos of Crete developed an unhealthy passion for a bull, she clambered inside a mechanical cow fashioned by the craftsman Daedalus and promptly conceived the Minotaur. The ...

One doesn’t need modern tools of computational analysis to determine that the most common words in Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses are ‘mama’ and ‘papa’. The stories it contains of the ...