The great awakening: Henry Shukman becomes a child of the universe
For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger…
The making of a monster: Paul Kagame’s bloodstained past
We have all become Paul Kagame’s useful idiots, says Nicholas Shakespeare
The paradox of Graham Greene – searching for peace in the world’s warzones
Graham Greene was constantly searching for peace of mind along with escapist thrills, says Nicholas Shakespeare
Novel explosives of the Cold War
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by…
My fictional Abimael Guzmàn turned out to be eerily accurate
Few Peruvians today are interested in ‘the Shining Path years’, which left no traces besides 70,000 mutilated bodies and a…
‘Where every vice was permissible’: Graham Greene’s Cuba
Cuba meant a lot to Graham Greene. Behind his writing desk in his flat in Antibes he had a painting…
Richard Sorge: the Soviet Union’s master spy
Interviewed on the Today programme on 7 March, a former executive of the gigantic Chinese tech firm Huawei admitted: ‘It…
How Enoch Powell fancied himself Viceroy of India — and other startling revelations
Interviews, like watercolours, are very hard to get right, and yet look how steadily their art has become degraded and…
The old man and his muse: Hemingway’s toe-curling infatuation with Adriana Ivancich
One rainy evening in December 1948, a blue Buick emerged from the darkness of the Venetian lagoon near the village…
Portugal’s entrancing capital has always looked to the sea
Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half…
Meeting the last Cuban fisherman to have known Ernest Hemingway
In Havana, one week before President Obama unthawed half a century of cold relations with Cuba, I talked to the…
Why I’ve been written out of Anthony Powell’s history
You’re in the index, but not in the book. This ghostly sensation has been my experience since 1990 after commissioning…
Australia was ruined the moment Europeans set foot there
Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down…
Mary Wesley’s passionate lifelong love affair
The novelist Mary Wesley never forgot the night of 26 October 1944. She was then 32, locked in a loveless…
A sensual Greek goddess
Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland…
A tidal wave of grief
Most victims of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake — which convinced Voltaire there could be no God — perished not in…
Gilded prostitution
‘An English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady, her age and…
Two small boys in the sea
An estimated 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 per cent of them children. Roughly 150 drownings occur in the UK.…
Righter of wrongs
I used to work for Ludo, as we all knew him on BBC2’s Did You See?, and was once thought…
Righter of wrongs
I used to work for Ludo, as we all knew him on BBC2’s Did You See?, and was once thought…
Divinely decadent
‘Oh the Mediterranean addiction, how we fall for it!’ So sighed Sybille Bedford, who spent the 1920s and 1930s in…
