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.

For cricketers in general and all aspiring captains in particular Brearley’s Art of Captaincy is an excellent book. It covers not only those areas of the game that concern cricket captains but also ...

One Morning Scrope Davies called on Byron and surprised him in bed. Davies found the poet wearing paper curlers in his hair. Byron stirred and admitted that curlers were a foolish habit. When Byron ...

One of the most comforting facts about the tempestuous life of Thomas Paine is that he didn’t do anything of any significance until he was nearly 40. If there hadn’t been a series of revolutions and ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

‘Nothing is implied in this publication about any person, living or dead, which is not herein explicitly stated.' Thus runs the caveat inside the front cover of this sustained politico-religious ...

Aristotle attributed the low pitch of men’s voices to their testicles acting as loom weights on their vocal cords. The high-pitched voices of the Furies and the Sirens were harbingers of death. The ...

Heidi Blake is a former assistant editor at the Sunday Times who now works for BuzzFeed. Her book does two things, one badly, the other well. On the positive side, Blake has written a pacy, fact-based ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

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 ...