The Wikipedia entry for John Irving has a useful anorak’s checklist of the recurring motifs in the author’s eleven novels to date. This diverse array includes bears; severed body parts; New Hampshire; ...

Angry advocate of violence and sombre prophet of the anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon was also a natty dresser and enjoyed a gin-and-tonic. A black, middle-class psychiatrist from Martinique, who ...

When asked in 1972 about the significance of the French Revolution, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai reportedly quipped, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ But while the meaning of the revolution in France could ...

Johnsey Cunliffe is a young Tipperary man with a disability that has rendered him somewhat lumbering and, in everyone’s estimation (including his own), simple. Despite this, the third-person narrative ...

Stylisation – the fatal awareness that one is writing just as one used to, only a touch more so – gets us all in the end. With Kingsley Amis it led to a series of late-period novels that threatened to ...

The original French thriller on which Andrew Lloyd Webber based his musical opens on a performance of Faust. Its star, Carlotta, sings the role of Margarita, and enraptures her adoring public until ...

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 ...

When the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid suffered from sleeplessness, which was all too often, he did what any sensible caliph would do: he summoned Masrur, his favourite executioner. As readers of The ...

One’s initial response is, why bother? Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of Robert Graves covers the same period as Good-bye to All That. It is no criticism to say that she writes less well than ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Although a pioneering physicist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal made it his mission to identify the divine ...