How clever of Nature to ‘choose’ Darwin to teach the world that she has, against the prevailing view of natural theology, no purpose, no teleology, no choice. No one could be more...
‘Of course, one has to write, but what can one say?’ Ursula Wyndham’s mother set up this despairing wail whenever she read in the Times that a friend had given birth. To a girl....
In the 1760s the greatest gap in Western knowledge of the world – the Pacific – was plugged, in theory, by the great southern continent of Terra Australis, awaiting its Columbus....
One of the many welcome aspects of Gorbachev’s glasnost is that it has made possible a mutual East-West re-examination of the twists and turns in the record of Cold War conflict and...
In the early summer of 1981 a string of riots burned up and down Britain like Armada beacons. Brixton resembled post-Blitz London. Whole areas of Manchester, Preston, Wolverhampton and Hull were...
Berlioz has not always been badly served by his biographers. True, there have been sensationalised lives, while hacks have trotted out ancient simplifications about his extravagance, his early...
It is hard to read this book dispassionately. Its gathering of stories, portraits, travelogues and fragments embodies such a rush and depth of enthusiasm – the stuff of many lives lived in...
A best-seller is a classic that can only be read once. All best-selling novelists create their own version of romance, which must have the authority of seeming to be the real thing. In the...
The first time I became anything more than routinely conscious of the existence of that faintly ludicrous figure, the Sultan of Brunei, was in December 1985. Until around then – as Lord...
In her ingenious ‘autobiography’ of Delariviere Manley, A Woman of No Character (1987), Fidelis Morgan contrived an effect of literary trompe l’oeil. Artfully interweaving...
Once upon a time there was a Tory grandee who owned a house on the Costa Brava. Venturing forth to an art gallery one day, who should he meet but a hippy. The hippy was a beautiful young lady,...
Octavio Paz occupies a unique position in the Spanish-speaking world. He is the foremost living poet of the language as well as being one of the most authoritative interpreters of the Hispanic...
Alcoholism softens the flesh – or at least, the 19th-century French variety did. When Verlaine died, Mallarmé watched a cast being taken of the face of this staunchly self-destructive...
We live in reactionary times. One indication of this is the growing trend among both politicians and academics to prescribe what historical study should be: how it should be organised and...
Naipaul’s epigraph – ‘There is a history in all men’s lives/Figuring the natures of the times deceased’ – warns us that on these journeys through the South of...
In February 1981 Mrs Thatcher made an ecstatic pilgrimage to Washington to commune with the new President, Ronald Reagan, about such then modish topics as supply-side economics and the evil...
Fervently hoping to be proved wrong, I think this marvellous book is all too likely to be denied the reception and the uses it deserves. Two things especially stand in its way: the celebrity...
Of the numerous biographical publications on the most problematic of 20th-century philosophers, Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: Toward his Biography stands out as the most detailed and...