Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that ...

Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in 2001, Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his ...

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 ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

The box lay on the table. ‘Everything is in here,’ the man in white said in a thick German accent. ‘I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people,’ he continued, ‘now it’s your ...

‘Your immortal soul!’ my father used to shout, brandishing his fist. His lament was also a threat – to me, his teenage daughter, that I stood to lose my soul if I lost my Catholic faith. Nowadays, of ...

Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all ...

This is a timely book. It reminds us of a particularly shameful moment in our modern history, when fascism, despite having just been defeated in a war in which millions lost their lives, once more ...

No one in Renaissance Florence could resist Girolamo Savonarola’s voice. An austere, forbidding Dominican friar, he had come to dominate city life long before the Medici were swept from power. Huge ...

The Rt Hon Sir Oliver Letwin has written one of the most important books of the year. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable. It’s important in the same way that an injection or ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

Ever since the United States assumed the mantle ‘leader of the free world’, in the acrid carnage of the Second World War, there has been a debate as to whether America is an empire in all but name, as ...