We know all about Republican violence, about its worst excesses; in Britain, some people, maybe even most, know what the initials IRA stand for. I wonder how many could name the principal...
‘It was not ever thus in England,’ says A.N. Wilson, stilting his prose in deference to the text he’s introducing. He’s speaking of the deluge of intimacies we can expect...
In the Seventies, I had a colleague who joined the cult of the Bhagwan Rajneesh. Returning to New Jersey in orange garments after a summer in India, David announced that he wanted to change his...
Second languages don’t come naturally to us, they have to be learnt, formally in large part and deliberately. The language we are born into the midst of is not learnt but...
‘Serious’ has become a cant word in a literary context, in rather the same way that ‘fine’ (‘she’s a fine person’) is the accepted fallback among clerics...
Stalinist, alcoholic, sexually ambivalent, Patrick Hamilton had all the prerequisites of a successful Thirties writer. That his success was uneven would seem simply another sign of the times, the...
In the 1929 General Election campaign, the Labour candidate for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet: £5 Reward! DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE. Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It...
Dostoevsky’s A Writer’s Diary is a huge grab-bag of a book, probably the least known of all his important works outside Russia – though in this regard his marvellous,...
By 1815 London was the biggest city anyone had ever seen. It was the most stable and prosperous Western metropolis and had been enriched further by a flood of Continental refugees and by works of...
I have been working on a review of a facsimile edition of Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte (first published in 1802). After only a couple of hours of typing and...
‘What Tory MPs really wanted,’ Margaret Thatcher writes of the Westland affair, ‘was leadership, frankness and a touch of humility, all of which I tried to provide.’ A...
Henry Moore was attracted by the idea of monumentality. He tried hard, but with limited success, to find ways of incorporating his sculpture into modern buildings. He also had the attractive idea...
Since it can be properly said that nothing in Harold Wilson’s political career became him like the leaving of it, there is some justice in the fact that he is now best-remembered for one...
Benjamin Constant was a Swiss Protestant patrician and a cosmopolitan, but many episodes of his life fall somewhere between soap opera and boulevard farce. For instance on 5 June 1808, the...
‘It were a delicate stratagem,’ muses King Lear at one point during his great mad scene: ...
Death is something that happens to other people: and hence, it might be inferred, the popularity of biography. Those whose lives are recorded die in the last chapter: the rest of us live for...
When prisoners write to me, as they do all the time, protesting their innocence, I always start with the question: ‘Why were you arrested?’ The answer usually gives some sort of clue...
The current fascination with Vico in the English-speaking world owes almost everything to the attention he has received from Isaiah Berlin. Before Berlin, Vico was the obscure Neapolitan...