Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Fiona MacCarthy met Walter Gropius (1883–1969) through Jack Pritchard, the British entrepreneur who built Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, an experiment in modernist living where Gropius took up ...

On 1 May 1976, a sixty-foot Polynesian voyaging canoe named Hōkūle‘a sailed southeast into the Pacific Ocean from the Hawaiian island of Maui. Double-hulled, steered by a long paddle and powered by ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Biographers of T S Eliot face a number of challenges, not least the marked disinclination of their subject to having his biography written at all. When, in the early 1960s, a scholar wrote an account ...

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 ...

Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid ...

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 – ...

This is without doubt one of the best biographies to have been written about David Ben-Gurion, perhaps the most interesting Jew of the 20th century. The historian and journalist Tom Segev manages to ...

In a recent contribution to the New Universities Quarterly (Autumn ‘79) entitled ‘Are the British Universities capable of Change?’, Dr A. H. Halsey presents a gloomy picture of British universities, ...

This is a book about people, in V S Naipaul’s opening words, a book of stories. He sees himself returning to his initial literary vocation, as a manager of narrative, giving news about others. The ...

This proved a difficult book to read: put down for a moment it was appropriated by someone else and thereafter continued to journey furtively about the house, pursued by frustrated readers. Treat it ...