Retired politicians have cornered the market in biographies of great leaders. These books annoy historians because they pinch their research and sell more copies. They tend to be uncritically admiring ...

If writing a biography is difficult, writing a biography of someone deemed a ‘genius’ is positively perilous. The danger of producing hagiography is all too real, and all too familiar in the history ...

In the prelims of his book, under a brooding photograph of his hero, Sander Meredeen quotes Richard Holmes to the effect that ‘one of the jobs of biography is to bring back the lost or the forgotten, ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Serial killers, convicted or alleged, undoubtedly exude a kind of corrupt majesty. Among them, for sheer originality and rather whiffy charisma, the modern emperor must be Jeffrey Dahmer. It was, of ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

‘To capture the fish is not all of the fishing,’ insisted that dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey; and, whilst that may be true enough, I feel my spirits sink whenever I see an angling book promoted ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Dividing lines cover the vast North American continent, writing meanings and demarcations onto its previously unplotted space. The most famous line of all was the Mason-Dixon, surveyed and drawn ...

Henry Phillips, Glenda George, George Craig, David Coward: French Books in Brief - Ideas in Seventeenth Century France by E J. Kearns; Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Drama and Thought by Robert ...

Death is the one promise life makes to us that it always keeps. From Homer, whose warriors at Troy are engulfed in the darkness of death, to Larkin glumly ‘going to the inevitable’, writers have shown ...

Just before Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and ruler of Bohemia, was, as the Irish put it, shot off, Walter Frentz made a colour portrait photograph. Hitler, anticipating further staff losses ...