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 ...

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 ...

WHEN SOLZHENITSYN WROTE his great three-volume classic, The Gulag Archipelago, it had a huge impact, particularly in France. There, since the Second World war, a great part of the reading classes had ...

If one were to hazard a guess as to the largest nature reserve in Europe, Chernobyl would be an unlikely contender. And yet, over the last thirty years, a vast area closed off to all but a few ...

Climate remains a focus of public debate whatever the distractions of credit crunches, wayward parliamentarians, or a general election. These two books look specifically at the impacts of climate ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

ONE OF THE similarities between fiction and real life is that both are made more palatable by a decent plot. Of course, there are those who believe that life really is plotted, or who see patterns - a ...

Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel, The Hand that First Held Mine, confronts the difficulties and wonders of motherhood. Through the lives of two women, Lexie and Elina, living a generation apart, a story ...

It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or ...

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 ...