Portraits require sitters. Portraits of the famous, which often seem designed for target practice, require the sitters to be sitting ducks as well. But Bob Dylan can’t stand sitting. Try...
‘I too work hard, Mrs Oliphant,’ said Queen Victoria to the Scottish novelist. Mrs Oliphant was famous for her productivity. She published biographies of Edward Irving and the Comte de...
Since the 1950s a loose coalition of scholars has brought about a radical transformation in our understanding of how the countryside of England and Wales came to acquire its salient features, a...
The vast Soviet-bloc intelligence operation in the West is commonly supposed to consist mainly of running illegals, moles and other agents. In fact, the KGB probably spends more of its time...
In Northanger Abbey we learn that nothing very awful in the way of immurement or assassination of wives, or any such Gothic goings-on, can occur in an English village, because of its...
Looking back over more than fifty years of publishing, I count myself lucky to have begun by working for Constant Huntington, chairman of Putnam, a Bostonian of soldierly appearance, blessed with...
Captain Kidd, though by no means the most successful of the pirates, was certainly the best-known. His name means piracy to this day, and it is a little strange to see it used in the title of the...
A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s...
Coleridge has always been our representative Romantic literary critic, and Matthew Arnold has long been thought of as the type of the Victorian critic. There is, perhaps, no need to topple Arnold...
It seems likely that critics in the future will see the literature of our age as being peculiarly obsessed with a perverse version of mimesis. They will have no trouble in classifying its...
Any boy scout strolling down Sunset Boulevard with his ears unwaxed these days could be forgiven for concluding that America invented Southern California in order to compensate Britain for the...
By the time he was 20 Henri Fournier wasn’t able to say whether it was the country itself that he missed – Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province – or the...
The bloodiness of the events of the Seventies in Cambodia, and the desperate nature of the refugee exodus, have been of such monstrous proportions as to hinder the emergence of detailed accounts...
In the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche maintains that life and the world are justifiable only aesthetically. The world is to be understood the way an artwork is, and life can become an artwork. If...
These tales of mob and gang will be appreciated by man and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much...
Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished...
One might say that the problem with Emma Hamilton is knowing quite how to take her. Near the end of her book, Flora Fraser quotes a startlingly vivid account of Emma’s behaviour just after...
The dilemmas referred to in the title of this book were those faced by a leading German scientist who believed in his country right or wrong even when that country became the embodiment of evil....