Richard Davenport-Hines

The year of living dangerously

8 January 2022 9:00 am

Atrocities, assassinations and spectacular accidents were just some of the horrors that marked 1922, says Richard Davenport-Hines

Bohemians rhapsodising: the favourite haunts of writers and artists

10 August 2019 9:00 am

Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of English and French literature at the City University of New York, published her…

Eric Hobsbawm, photographed in 1996. He admitted late in life that he had developed in youth ‘a facility for deleting unpleasant or unacceptable data’

How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’

2 February 2019 9:00 am

Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…

The unknown Auden: the poet’s dashing brother

11 August 2018 9:00 am

A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater,…

Secrets of an abused aristocratic childhood

2 December 2017 9:00 am

Charles Duff’s memoir tells a sad tale of cruelty and betrayal with spry wit rather than bitter resentment. Notwithstanding the…

Muddled in minutiae

23 September 2017 9:00 am

‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his…

Ferdinand Mount at the 2010 Edinburgh International Book Festival

Understated eloquence

8 April 2017 9:00 am

It is 50 years since the publication of Very Like a Whale, Ferdinand Mount’s first novel. ‘Mr Mount’s distinguishing feature…

An infinite spirit

28 January 2017 9:00 am

Can American publishers be dissuaded from foisting absurd, bombastic subtitles on their books as if readers are all Trumpers avid…

Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé by Edouard Manet, 1876

An infinite spirit

26 January 2017 3:00 pm

Can American publishers be dissuaded from foisting absurd, bombastic subtitles on their books as if readers are all Trumpers avid…

All about C

27 August 2016 9:00 am

In March 1981 Margaret Thatcher went to the hospital bedside of Maurice Oldfield, the former head of the Secret Intelligence…