When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

Catherine Millet is the girl who can't say 'non'. Editor of the highly-regarded Art Press, she has made it her life's work to sleep with as many men as possible (she has always, she says, had a thing ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is ...

UNLIKE HITLER OR Stalin, of whom there are any number of decent modern biographies, Mussolini still seems ill-served by historians, at least those writing in English. A couple of years ago the ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

In January 1914, six poets drove from London to Sussex to eat an afternoon meal with a seventh, much older poet. Two of the six, W B Yeats and Ezra Pound, are among the truly great poets of the age, ...

FEW PSYCHIATRIC SYMPTOMS are as remarkable as the conviction that one's thoughts and actions are being controlled by some mysterious, malevolent machine. One of the earliest and most colourful ...