At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

In 1991, the dying days of the Soviet Union, a letter arrived at the BBC’s Moscow bureau addressed to me, as the service’s Moscow correspondent, with a startling request. It was from an intrepid ...

Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

Let’s begin by dispelling a misconception: in essence, László Krasznahorkai’s sentences aren’t long. While the use of the comma or coordinating conjunction in place of the full stop can imbue a writer ...

Some of the finest American novels were written at least partly in the hope of effecting moral change. From Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin through The Grapes of Wrath and beyond runs a clear, ...

In the April issue of Literary Review Nick Holdstock ended his perceptive review of Michael Meyer’s In Manchuria by asking where the ‘great books about country life’ in other parts of China were. Now, ...

Albert Camus wrote that ‘the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...