Biography
God save us from Søren Kierkegaard
Surely God, if He existed, would find a major source of entertainment down the ages in the activities of theologians,…
Time for a Tippett revival
Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English…
Socrates the romantic hero?
If western philosophy is no more than ‘footnotes to Plato’, so, arguably, is the myth of its founding hero, Socrates.…
Robert A. Heinlein: the ‘giant of SF’ was sexist, racist — and certainly no stylist
Like someone who has bought a first computer, then reads the manual from front to back but never actually gets…
The Lady with the Limp: homage to the one-legged Virginia Hall, SOE’s ‘most dangerous’ agent
‘This seems to be in your rough area. I mean, it contains wooden legs and everything…’ my commissioning editor at…
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
The unimportance of Ernest Hemingway: why should we bother reading him anymore?
What is the most repulsive sentence in English/American literature? Even as a 12-year-old American boy, I cringed when reading, in…
The best way to defeat totalitarianism? Treat it as a joke
Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the…
Should William Penn be shaking in his grave?
The ultimate driving force of William Penn’s adult life is inaccessible, as the Quaker phrase ‘Inner Light’ suggests. While a…
How Calouste Gulbenkian became the richest man in the world
Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to…
The wildest Wilde of all: the scandalous life of Oscar’s father
‘To have a father is always big news,’ according to the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s early novel, The Engine of…
Vivien Leigh: the brilliant star that fast burned out
‘Dark Star’ is a suitable enough title in itself, but the definition makes it a brilliant one: ‘A Dark Star’,…
In praise of John Meade Falkner: poet, arms-dealer and unforgettable novelist
When H.H. Asquith, as prime minister, visited Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, during the first world war, he found a vast…
Edward Gorey: master of the macabre
‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an…
Elizabeth II: Queen of tact and diplomacy
In her 66 years on the throne the Queen has represented Britain on official visits to at least 126 countries…
A real-life Bluebeard: on the track of France’s most notorious serial killer
From Colette to Rudyard Kipling, celebrities flocked for front-row seats at the 1921 trial of Henri Landru, the notorious ‘lonely…
Is Lionel Messi the greatest footballer of all time?
If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is you won’t enjoy this book much. If you do, you probably will.…
Saul Bellow: love the work, if not the man
Boxing writers sometimes try to make comparisons across weight groups. They used to say, for example, that Floyd Mayweather was…
Germaine Greer continues to shock and awe
There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world,…
Gandhi on Hitler: ‘I do not believe him to be as bad as he is portrayed’
‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India,…
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…
The unknown Auden: the poet’s dashing brother
A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater,…
The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been…
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
The Wallis Simpson I knew – by Nicky Haslam
One would have thought this particular can of worms might, after nearly 80 years, be well past its sell-by date.…
