According to Elizabeth Goldring in this engrossing biography, the earliest recorded use of the term ‘miniature’ in English literature comes in Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance The New Arcadia, ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

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 ...

Early on in what is, I hope, the first instalment of his autobiography, Frederic Raphael describes how, as a schoolboy at Charterhouse, he disqualified himself from sitting for a closed scholarship to ...

J G Ballard’s new novel is as the title implies a psychopathic tour-de-force, in which the author’s genius for suspense, powerful atmospherics and evocation of place is displayed with consummate skill ...

I doubt if anyone has ever published a ‘keenly anticipated’ eleventh collection, but having reached that career milestone Simon Armitage finds himself very much betwixt and between. On the one hand ...

Best-selling author Robert Lacey begins his fascinating history with Cheddar Man, who lived 9,000 years ago when England was still joined to Europe. He ends with the discovery of DNA and thus creates ...

Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Vladimir Putin served his apprenticeship in the KGB toward the end of the Cold War, a period during which ...

First, a confession. Ali Smith has been a heroine of mine since she eschewed professional theatre companies and chose instead a bunch of schoolchildren to adapt her novel Hotel World for the stage.

When Prince Charles eventually becomes king, during ‘the most sacred part of the ceremony’ he will be anointed on his head, heart, shoulders, hands and elbows with ‘ambraegrisiae 3iiij’, a fragrant ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...