There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

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 ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

One of the Selected Thoughts of Chairman Mao begins, ‘A revolution is not a dinner party,’ and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (to give it its full name) everyone quoted that Thought ...

Winifred Nicholson never forgot the first viewing that she and her husband, Ben Nicholson, had of Christopher Wood’s pictures. All of them were then living in Chelsea, Wood in a house that belonged to ...

Metroland is divided into three sections. In the first section, we meet Toni and Chris as schoolboys who share a devotion to the intangible values of art, and a constant desire to ‘épater le bourgeois ...

EARLY ON IN this magnificent biography, Richard Thorpe reveals that Anthony Eden was rated last out of nineteen in a poll on British twentieth-century prime ministers. In a field populated by Neville ...

In his preface, John Julius Norwich, author of two fine histories of the Normans in Sicily, writes: ‘The Strait of Messina is only a couple of miles across and the island is politically part of Italy; ...

Anglophone gay male fiction has entered an uncannily quiet period. No longer the darling of the big publishing houses, especially when compared to lesbian- and trans-related fiction, it sometimes ...

One Two Three Four begins and ends with Paul McCartney counting in the band on stage at the Cavern Club in 1961. In between is a brilliantly executed study of cultural time, social space and the ...

Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out ...