In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson: Heads Will Roll - The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution by David Andress ...

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, ...

ONE SENSES THAT, like many another Bildungsroman, this novel, sprawling episodically over the childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of its central character, might have been subtitled 'Instead of ...

For five years now, Canongate’s Myths series has been imaginatively recasting the ancient stories that are the foothills of myth across cultures from China to ancient Greece and the Amazon; now comes ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

Beauchamp Roding church stands alone among the rolling fields of north-west Essex; half a century ago, the local explanation for its isolation was that the village had been wiped out by the Black ...

Mikhail Bulgakov, most readers and critics would concur, is the most widely loved and perhaps the greatest Russian writer in the Soviet period of fictional prose and drama. Some might be more deeply ...

The most decisive developments of Henry VIII’s turbulent reign came in the 1530s, when the king denied the authority of the Pope, asserted his own supposedly God-given right to control the Church, and ...

‘The days are days of shaking’, declared the preacher Jeremiah Whittaker in an anxious sermon before the House of Commons in 1643; ‘days of trouble, rebuke and blasphemy’. And, he might have added, ...

The year 2016, the anteroom to the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917, has already brought us several books that, in various ways, speak to the epochal events that brought down a ...