The days are long gone when philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition could airily dismiss Heidegger’s magisterial Being and Time as based on a mistake of language. His central importance in twentieth ...

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

For Maxwell Sim, in Jonathan Coe’s new novel The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, a game of cards played by a Chinese mother and her young daughter in a restaurant ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

Of all the novelists of the last fifty years, there is no one I more regret not having met than Penelope Fitzgerald. Thls volume, a collection of eighty-four separate pieces (reviews, lectures, and ...

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 ...

There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...

Twenty years ago, in A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood gave an account of a teacher's day which, although marred by its mawkish memories of the hero's dead lover, remains both extremely funny as ...

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 ...

Unexpected discoveries are the stuff of fairy tales: the story of The Turnip Princess’s metamorphosis from dusty manuscript to Penguin Classic is almost one in itself. Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810 ...

‘To take risks,’ said Nietzsche, ‘is to remain scrupulous.’ Few do it better than Peter Ackroyd, the conventional, punctilious surface of his novels habitually undermined by strange metaphysical ...