It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

Among the bombings that marked the beginning of 2017, one took place on New Year’s Day at the CasaPound bookshop in Florence, an outpost of the Italian neo-fascist or ‘alt-right’ CasaPound movement, ...

The far Left and the far Right have agreed about few things in English history, but one of them is the iniquity of the Revolution of 1688–9, which mainstream opinion credits with the emergence of ...

‘In my belly is an octopus and in it are God’s children. Living children. These are things I must not speak of.’ These are the startling words of a German judge named Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Lydia Davis taught herself Norwegian in order to read his books. Haruki Murakami translated him into Japanese. Karl Ove Knausgaard reveres him. Awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature an ...

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

Can you freeze a moment of history? Keith Middlemas surely gets close to doing so in this absorbing book. He achieves this partly through meticulous research, and partly through a series of sketched ...

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Paul Edmondson and I, co-editors of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, should feel flattered by this book. Its title simply adds a question mark to ours.

It is not hard to understand the continuing fascination with the crimes of Jack the Ripper 130 years on. Besides the shoal of books, there is even a new museum to exploit his ghastliness. The ...