Biography
How Noddy and Big Ears conquered the world
Love her or loathe her, Enid Blyton and the safe, sunny world she cleverly marketed will remain a publishing phenomenon, says Sam Leith
Anthony Holden is nostalgic for journalism’s good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
The life of René Magritte was even more surprising than his art
René Magritte’s life, so outwardly respectable, was as full of surprises as his art, says Philip Hensher
How Shane MacGowan became Ireland’s prodigal son
I once stood on a Dublin street with Shane MacGowan and watched little old ladies who can’t ever have been…
Far from being our dullest king, George V was full of surprises
‘Victorian’ stuck, and ‘Edwardian’ too. But ‘Georgian’, as an adjective associated with the next monarch in line, never caught on.…
Even the greatest tennis players need to be adored
Louis MacNeice once wrote that if you want to know what chasing the Grail is like, ask Lancelot not Galahad.…
What motivates Peter Thiel apart from the desire for more wealth?
If you’ve only heard one thing about Peter Thiel (and many have heard nothing at all) it is that he…
Celebrating Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records
To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation…
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was lucky to escape retribution in 1945
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
Was Josiah Wedgwood really a radical?
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…
Should the Duke of Windsor have been tried for treason?
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
Why did the Allies dismiss the idea of a German resistance movement?
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
Fascist, anti-Semite and dupe: the dark side of G.K. Chesterton
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
W.G. Sebald’s borrowed truths and barefaced lies
Why did W.G. Sebald risk his reputation by telling such strange, repeated lies, wonders Lucasta Miller
An interest in the bizarre helps keep melancholy at bay
Philip Hensher finds Robert Burton’s perception of the world and the human condition endlessly fascinating
A true bohemian: the story of Nico’s rise and fall
It is well established that artists are not always the nicest people. On the surface, the life of the model,…
The complex character of Tricky Dick
In this Age of Trump, as we cast about for some moment in American history that might help us make…
What is the secret of Duran Duran’s durability?
In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously,…
The disappearing man: who was the real John Stonehouse?
Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974
Foucault was shielded from scandal by French reverence for intellectuals
Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus,…
We’ve embraced William Blake without having any idea of what he was on about
Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were…
The short, unhappy life of Ivor Gurney — wounded, gassed and driven insane
Andrew Motion describes the inner turmoil of the neglected poet Ivor Gurney
Waiting for Gödel is over: the reclusive genius emerges from the shadows
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…
Over the rainbow: D.H. Lawrence’s search for a new way of life
Philip Hensher describes D.H. Lawrence’s restless search of a new way of life
A pawn in the Great Game: the sad story of Charles Masson
‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander…
