Paul Auster is so implicated in his own fictions that it is often hard to tell whether his covert appearances there represent a Modernist textual teasing or a baser vanity; whether his walk-on...
I made my first visit to Belfast when I was almost 11, late in 1939. The war had just started, and Italy had joined Germany in aggression. My father was the sergeant-in-charge of the Royal Ulster...
Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or...
‘Maybe this is a detective story,’ a character thinks in John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It’s a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any...
Tramming was one of the most painful and soul-destroying jobs in a pit. Only pits like the two in our village employed trammers. Other, better maintained pits in adjacent areas had high, wide...
In her portraits Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun did her very best to give a pleasing account of the facts of the flesh. The faces are attractive, the expressions forthcoming and responsive....
There is no near equivalent to A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 apart from Friedrich Noack’s three volumes (1907-27) listing all the Germans in Rome, from the...
On the face of it, Quintin Hogg ought to be a great historic figure. He comes into the history books as the victorious pro-Munich candidate at the famous Oxford by-election of 1938, is...
The 22-year-old Flaubert, as yet only a bored law student in Paris, writing to his sister in Rouen to tell her of the evening he had spent with, among others, Victor Hugo: I took pleasure in...
You step up to the wooden door, a heavy, rustic affair set in a brick arch, and you peer through two small holes conveniently set at around head height. You do this not because you are a snoop,...
On the 20th Floor of the old offices of the New Yorker, at 25 West 43rd Street, the elevators let out onto a narrow, desolate vestibule. Its floor was set with dirty beige linoleum tiles that...
John Le Carré called it ‘the Abteilung’, but the real name of the East German foreign intelligence department was the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Main Intelligence...
‘Honey, she’s a forerunner, that’s what she is, a kind of pioneer that’s got left behind. I believe she’s the beginning of things like me.’ Radclyffe Hall has...
‘I told the Führer that I had recently been reading Carlyle’s book on Frederick the Great,’ Goebbels records in his diary of 27 February 1945: He knows the book very well...
I was a friend and devoted admirer of Peter Cook for thirty years but I never realised until I read this book how much our early lives had overlapped. We were born in the same week into the same...
By the time Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 the nuanced position he took on the Algerian revolution had caused a scandal in orthodox progressive circles. Camus kept...
In the sixties, three scholarly biographies of Keats appeared within a short time: W.J. Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s in 1963, Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful;...
On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best...