Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

It seems to be the season of ‘double lives’. I have on my desk galleys of The Double Life of Paul de Man, the reader-proof doyen of deconstruction who began his career in Belgium during the Second ...

Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of ...

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 ...

Phil Baker and Antony Clayton write good books about bad books. It is a pity George Orwell, connoisseur of the ‘good bad book’, is no longer with us to relish their intrepid ventures into the swampy ...

Kit de Waal’s second novel, The Trick to Time, begins with Mona, a sixty-year-old Irish immigrant, standing by her window in the middle of the night. She notices a man in the building across from her ...

This is a strange book, written with considerable charm and plenty of gorgeous detail, but difficult in many ways to get a handle on. The life referred to in the title is not Philip Hensher’s own, but ...

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’.

Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) is a wonderful, horrible film. It follows the adventures of Johnny, a Mancunian Raskolnikov, introduced to us in the first scene committing a vicious rape. Repellent yet ...

Christopher Hitchens: Enoch Who Hurt Me So Dreadfully - The Lives of Enoch Powell by Patrick Cosgrave ...

Riding through Lorraine after the defeat of France in the autumn of 1870, Otto von Bismarck was accosted by a woman whose husband had just been taken into custody for attacking a Prussian hussar with ...

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, ...