‘Anyone of no public eminence of whom the world in general has never heard (and I come into both these categories) is presumptuous in thinking he can write a book which people will want to read.’ Thus ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

Every 9 November during the Third Reich, Hitler and his minions performed a solemn memorial rite for comrades killed during the struggle for power. The day that properly commemorated the dead of the ...

Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

Sir James Stirling was and still is the central figure in postwar British and possibly world architecture. He was the godfather to the high-tech generation of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster as well ...

This labyrinthine curiosity begins with a ten-page glossary of ‘historic terms’, certain of which remain in everyday use in discourse on the New Forest. They may be ancient but they are not archaic.

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...

Ann Wroe has become a daredevil writer. The obituaries editor of The Economist, she is by education a historian; she followed her first book, a journalistic inquest into the Iran-Contra Affair, with a ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. In both the USA and Latin America, there is a long-standing belief that the countries of the Americas have a ...