Biography
Three dashing Frenchmen captivate Victorian London
Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat —…
A cross between Joyce Grenfell and Frida Kahlo: Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins
In 1971, Tove Jansson paid one of her many visits to London, where 1960s fashion hangovers made the whole city…
Edith Nesbit — a children’s writer of genius who disinherited her own adopted offspring
‘When one writes for children,’ the novelist Jill Paton Walsh has said, ‘there are more people in the room. Writing…
What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?
Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a…
How Britain conned the US into entering the war
In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more…
In praise of Thomas Graham, unsung hero of the Peninsular War
Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but…
The trail-blazing women writers of the 1960s were quite different from the male Angries
The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and…
Walter Bagehot: the revered Victorian who got almost everything wrong
Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of…
Does Kim Jong-un deliberately emulate a Bond villain?
North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst…
Feasts, flowers and plein-air painting at Benton End
Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises,…
Alma Mahler — maddening, mesmerising or plain malicious?
It must be rare for a popular song to have such a lasting influence on a posthumous reputation. However, this…
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 were you when you read John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’?
Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If…
Fantasist, bigamist and cheat: the colourful career of Robert Parkin Peters
In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was not merely one of the best historians…
Fame made Gabriel García Márquez a pedantic bore
Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and…
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…
