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 Compasses, a dingy pothouse in High Wycombe, was not the most likely place to encounter John Milton, Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. Yet it was here, in March 1794, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, ...

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 ...

Andrew Miller likes to shift the ground beneath his reader's feet. His first two novels, Ingenious Pain and Casanova, were set in the eighteenth century; Oxygen alternated between Paris, Los Angeles ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...

A t half past one in the morning of Tuesday 19 July 1898, passengers on the cross-Channel steamer from Calais to Dover might have observed a solitary middle-aged man standing on the deck, gazing ...

When John Updike was a young kid picking psoriatic skin from his back, he drew a picture called ‘Mr Sun sees Mr Winter in his office’. Mr Sun, a corny ball of fire with stick legs is seated behind a ...

George Steiner once had interesting and unusual things to say, and he said them in a way that was all his own. Since then (perhaps for the greater part of the time that he has been a known name), he ...

I once asked a former Oxford classics don which verse translation of Homer he thought was best. He shrugged before saying, ‘Read Homer in Greek, or else in prose.’ On the face of it, this looks like a ...

Not too likely judging by my current rate of promotion, but if I were God and mulling over a bit of fire and brimstone for the House of Commons, Richard Body’s membership might stay My hand. We get ...

Ammonites and Leaping Fish is a title as engaging as I suspect the author, Penelope Lively, to be. Born in Cairo in 1933, she was a typical upper-class English child of those times. Her father was a ...