Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...

The Kennedy family has so often been likened to the House of Atreus in Greek mythology that the comparison has become something of a cliché. But reading this absorbing, first-rate and scholarly study ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Ill Fares the Land must surely be one of the most remarkable books on politics to have appeared for a very long time. A part of the book’s compelling interest comes from the circumstances in which it ...

I don’t usually read books that I am sent to review in bed. But this one is the ideal bedtime book: slow-burning as diaries are, but richly absorbing, with the advantage that it doesn’t matter if one ...

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.

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 ...

If Helen’s was the face that launched a thousand ships, Arthur’s is the name that has spawned a thousand theories. Scarcely a year passes without someone locating the ‘real’ site of Camelot or the ...

How naïve we were in the mid-1950s. We saw Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues standing on the great Tien An Men Gate reviewing the masses and wrote of the comradeship of those who had endured the Long ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...