Lord Byron, shortly before his brief, doomed marriage to her niece Annabella Milbanke, described Elizabeth Lamb, Lady Melbourne (known to the admiring young poet as Lady M), as ‘the best friend I ever ...

In her latest book, which tells the stories of three generations of women, and the men who love them, Penelope Lively presents us with a wholesome vision of England. It begins in 1935, when a ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

The blurb of The Famine Plot claims that Tim Pat Coogan is Ireland’s leading historian. This is not exactly right, but it is true that Coogan’s works sell widely and have a significant influence both ...

John the Painter (not to be confused with Peter the Painter, the Latvian anarchist/terrorist involved in the Sidney Street siege of 1911, in which Winston Churchill first won notoriety) was the nom de ...

Books of photography and text – whether conflations of picture postcards and tourist brochure writing or imaginative marriages of language and photographic image – have formed a genre of their own.

Sometime during the 1970s the witch was transformed from a black-hatted crone to a wise medicine women. The spell was cast by radical feminist historians, determined to find their own heroic ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson ...

It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

John Gray: Being Human - At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell ...

Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...