Since two pioneering studies appeared in 1954, Arnaldo Momigliano’s ‘Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method’, and Giuseppe Giarrizzo’s Edward Gibbon e la cultura...
In 1936 Denton Welch, who was then an art student at Goldsmiths College and had no thoughts of becoming a writer, suffered an appalling accident. He was bicycling from Greenwich down the main...
What apter practitioners of autobiography than historians? Trained to examine the past with an impartial eye, alert to oddities of context and artifices of narrative, they would appear to be the...
Fame came early to George Barker, but not so early as to take him by surprise. He designed his own ‘crypto-Renaissance catafalque’ at the age of 13, just to be on the safe side, and a...
In September 1848, Louis-Napoleon returned from his long exile in London armed with a startling blueprint for what he was later to call his ‘plan for the embellishment of Paris’. It...
‘The ghosts we deserve’ was the Listener’s headline for Simon Raven’s review of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece in December 1952. Most reviewers had gushed with...
Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son was one of the first and most wounding of the Edwardian attacks on the high Victorians. Casting himself as a ‘little helpless child’, Gosse...
Stafford Cripps is perhaps the only major figure of 20th-century British politics to have had no full biography – one based on the whole range of scholarly sources. His political...
A few days after the World Trade Center was destroyed I heard on the radio that Cantor Fitzgerald, which had traded bonds on its 101st, 103rd, 104th and 105th floors, had six hundred missing...
‘Sad things can happen when a writer chooses the wrong subject,’ Wilfrid Sheed once observed. ‘First the writer suffers, then the reader, and finally the publisher, all together...
A distantish relation of mine, R. Ellis Roberts, was, for a few years from 1928, literary editor of the New Statesman, and a relatively undistinguished one at that. Kingsley Martin described...
Primo Levi is among the most read and most resonant witnesses to the greatest human disaster of a disastrous age. He created more powerful images, more mind-sustaining turns of phrase through...
‘The mind is a scoundrel,’ Dostoevsky wrote in his notes for The Brothers Karamazov, ‘but stupidity is straight and honest.’ This wasn’t what he himself thought, or...
Murdoch denied that she used her novels to stage her ideas, pretending to ‘an absolute horror of putting theories or “philosophical ideas” as such into my novels’, insisting: ‘I might put in...
Reader, where are you sitting? Perhaps sunk in a sunlounger by the pool, or perched on a joggling seat on the Tube. Should anyone be reading this on a hard, cold seat in the privy, then they...
In memory of Sandra LahireHow not to write a biography of Sylvia Plath? We might put the question another way. What is the relationship for a poet between writing a mind and writing a life? Does...
Rosamond Lehmann was born the day after Queen Victoria’s funeral. When the First World War broke out she was 13, on holiday with her family on the Isle of Wight. The imminence of...
In 1983, when I was 11 and living in South Africa, I went to veldskool along with about twenty other girls from one of Johannesburg’s ‘liberal’ private schools. Veldskool...