It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

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 ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

I have often heard it said that Lt-Gen Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, provided the model for Evelyn Waugh’s immortal Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Carton de Wiart won his Cross, and was ...

It is common enough to review a book by a friend, but rare when that friend is not just the author of the book but also the publisher, and not just the publisher of the book but of the magazine in ...

Hitler’s Royal Welcome - The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration by Stephan Malinowski (Translated from ...

The idea of the army being a safe space may strike us as strange, until you recall that China’s greatest living novelist, Yan ...

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 ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

‘He talks slowly but continuously’, said one of Henry James’s later amanuenses, who of course wrote most of it down. The writing-down in part produced what can only be called the ‘world’ of James’s ...

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 ...