Frances Wilson

The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor

16 December 2023 9:00 am

Elagabalus’s suffocating party tricks may have been exaggerated, but Domitian’s sinister, death-themed feasts could be seen as a dictator’s flamboyant threat

Ireland’s most notorious murderer still casts a disturbing spell

8 July 2023 9:00 am

After months of conversations with Ireland’s most notorious murderer, Mark O’Connell got both more and less than he bargained for, says Frances Wilson

Triumph and disaster in the War of Jenkins’ Ear

13 May 2023 9:00 am

David Grann returns to the greatest sea story ever told: of Captain Anson’s piratical feat, and ‘the mutiny that never was’ aboard the Wager

How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler

27 August 2022 9:00 am

Frances Wilson describes a group of self-obsessed intellectuals united by mutual loathing in a small university town in the 1790s

Was Jane Morris a sphinx without a secret?

18 June 2022 9:00 am

Jane Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites’ favourite model, remains as enigmatic as ever, says Frances Wilson

Howard Jacobson superbly captures the terrible cost of becoming a writer

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a…

Yours disgusted, H.G. Wells: the young writer finds marriage insufferable

6 November 2021 9:00 am

After a wretched childhood, H.G. Wells was ruthless in making up for lost time, says Frances Wilson

How does David Sedaris get away with saying the unsayable?

2 October 2021 9:00 am

These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond…

We’ve embraced William Blake without having any idea of what he was on about

3 July 2021 9:00 am

Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were…

Stealing the story: A Lonely Man, by Chris Power, reviewed

8 May 2021 9:00 am

Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…

What does ownership of land really mean?

13 February 2021 9:00 am

At the end of the last century, Simon Winchester bought 123 acres of wooded mountainside in the hamlet of Wassaic,…

Euthanasia sitcom: What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

17 October 2020 9:00 am

What Are You Going Through is both brilliant and mercifully brief. Weighing in at 200-odd pages, it can be read…

A story without redemption: The Lying Life of Adults, by Elena Ferrante, reviewed

29 August 2020 9:00 am

‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful…

Good biographers make the best companions

27 June 2020 9:00 am

Strange, when your own life flatlines, the way in which other lives become suddenly more interesting. I have been retreating…

Excess and incest were meat and drink to the Byrons

11 April 2020 9:00 am

Excess, incest and marital misery were in the blood. Frances Wilson uncovers several generations of infamous Byrons

Could Leslie Jamison please stop sitting on the fence?

30 November 2019 9:00 am

Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to…

Fame made Gabriel García Márquez a pedantic bore

4 May 2019 9:00 am

Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and…

Contradictions are the bedrock of who she is: Germaine Greer photographed in 1993

Germaine Greer continues to shock and awe

3 November 2018 9:00 am

There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world,…

Portrait of Dante by Luca Signorelli

The perfect guide to a book everyone should read

11 August 2018 9:00 am

‘The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read,’ according to Jorge Luis Borges, and every Italian has…

Johnson has a plate of food sent to him behind a screen at his publisher’s office. Painting byHenry Wallis

The wit and wisdom of Dr Johnson is still of benefit to us all

16 June 2018 9:00 am

The most irritating of recent publishing trends must be the literary self-help guide, and Henry Hitchings’s contribution to the genre…

Ragged spectres, half sunk in mud, half lost in shadow: Joseph Gray’s unnerving ‘A Ration Party’

The disappearing acts of Joseph Gray, master of military camouflage

24 March 2018 9:00 am

On a night in Paris in 1914, Gertrude Stein was walking with Picasso when the first camouflaged trucks passed by.…

They shared a love of books, beekeeping, print-collecting, alchemy, geometry, music, astronomy and the English language: John Evelyn (left) and Samuel Pepys

Two enquiring minds

19 August 2017 9:00 am

Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…

Benjamin Franklin in London, with the bust of Isaac Newton on his desk

Benjamin Franklin: from man about town to man on the run

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of…

A portrait by Edward Savage of the Washingtons at home, with two of Martha’s grandchildren, adopted by her after the death of their parents

George and Martha Washington were an odd first First Couple

5 December 2015 9:00 am

Frances Wilson on America’s likeable, if unlikely, first First Couple

What does it really mean to have a tyrannical father?

24 October 2015 9:00 am

What was it like, asks Jay Nordlinger, to have Mao as your father, or Pol Pot, or Papa Doc? The…