Although his literary works are by no means uniformly successful, Peter Ackroyd may safely be described as an author possessed of genius, and had he died before attaining middle age (like Bruce ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

Certain names carry with them the whiff of brimstone. In the world of bibliophiles and booksellers, perhaps no name is more sulphurous than that of Thomas James Wise. Celebrated in his lifetime as the ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move. ‘Do other artists feel as I do,’ she wondered, ...

What a difference a decade makes. In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested ...

While the process by which a person becomes part of a terrorist group is different in every case, there are patterns and similarities in the ways people are radicalised. Identifying them is a big part ...

Fuchsia Dunlop is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Chinese cuisine. She made her name with Sichuan Cookery in 2001, following that book up with a slew of others, all on different aspects of ...

British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

One piece of Tolkien lore that last year’s expanded edition of The Letters of J R R Tolkien made abundantly clear was quite how highly the author regarded himself as a poet. In 1916, aged twenty-four, ...

Yet another book on the origins of the Second World War might seem excessive, but this one takes an original approach. Its focus is on the quality and accuracy of information obtained through ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...