Richard Davenport-Hines has written the entries on Jack the Ripper and other serial killers for the New Dictionary of National Biography. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics 1500-2000 was published in 2001.
Britain in the early 1960s was a divided country, torn by conflicting impulses, towards the past and the future, tradition and experimentation, dignity and fun.
Even before the ship sank the century of progress was pregnant with the Titanic’s fate.
All over the world, postgraduate students of English who might once have written on Wordsworth or Mrs Gaskell are now turning out theses on vampires, monsters, sado-masochism and mutilation. Most...
Pound died in 1972; Auden, who was 22 years younger, in 1973. Both writers underwent the usual posthumous dip in attention and reputation. This familar dégringolade is a mysterious process, and...
On 10 January 1957 the momentous news reached the family publishing house in St Martin’s Lane. ‘Mr Macmillan has just been made prime minister,’ his elder brother Daniel was...
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