In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

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 ...

Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, ...

The death of Isabella de’ Medici, favourite daughter of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, was as squalid as her life had been glittering. She was strangled in a particularly unpleasant and elaborate way ...

THE ROMANTICISM THAT clothed the British effort in the Second World War has taken some decades to wear thin. Correlli Barnett, in his magisterial The Audit of War (published in 1986), gave the lie to ...

The epigraph, taken from William Cowper, to Part Four of Jonathan Coe’s engrossing, labyrinthine Number 11 is crucial to understanding where Coe is now as a writer. It refers to one of the book’s ...

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, ...

As the 84-year-old widow of a QC, and with an OBE for services to literature, Jane Gardam is an expert on achievement, old age, bereavement, and rivalry in the legal profession, and she empathises ...

They might seem an incongruous pair at first, but historically speaking Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder are a natural duo for comparative study. When Bruegel entered the painters’ guild ...

Can you freeze a moment of history? Keith Middlemas surely gets close to doing so in this absorbing book. He achieves this partly through meticulous research, and partly through a series of sketched ...

John Lanchester’s last book, Whoops! (2008), was a typically clear-sighted, witty guide to the credit crunch for the general reader. It grew, he has said, out of the research for this, his fourth ...

In late April 2012, frightened inhabitants of Timbuktu reported a ghostly figure criss-crossing the town on a white horse. He was ‘dressed all in white, with a length of cotton bound round his face in ...