One Monday morning in September 1940, Raymond Aron was lying in bed at a camp for Free French soldiers in Aldershot. His roommate, who had arrived the previous afternoon, asked him the time and,...
Christine Keeler is insistent on Stephen Ward having been at the dead centre of political intrigue, rather than just a dilettante at that as well as everything else. Her wish to retrieve her past is understandable....
They came for Comrade Prince D.S. Mirsky, ‘aristocrat of critics’, some time in the night of 2 to 3 June 1937. He lived in a high, bare room which had a fine view over Moscow. It was...
In the spring of 1907, a few weeks after Edith Wharton had met Morton Fullerton in Paris, she described him to a mutual friend as ‘very intelligent, but slightly mysterious, I think’....
Joseph O’Neill’s grandfathers, one Irish, the other Turkish, were both imprisoned without trial during World War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de...
In the introduction to the first volume of his biography of Russell, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, Ray Monk was clear, as his title indicated, about the story he had to tell, though...
Can it be, as Jackie Wullschlager maintains, that in the 1840s and 1850s Hans Christian Andersen was ‘the most famous writer in Europe’, and that ‘two centuries after his birth...
Twenty-five years ago A.L. Rowse, whose memory becomes more blessed in an age of research assessment exercises, made known to the world the riveting personality of the Elizabethan and Jacobean...
For more than thirty years, until her death in 1965, Dawn Powell lived and worked ceaselessly in Greenwich Village. She produced 15 novels, set in Manhattan or the small towns of her native Ohio,...
It’s four years since my husband, the historian and socialist Raphael Samuel, died of cancer at the age of 61. In the weeks after his death, I wrote about him every day. I filled a boxfile...
Travelling to Paris recently, I was surprised to see advertisements for ‘Joséphine Baker, Music-hall et paillettes’, an exhibition at the Espace Drouot-Montaigne commemorating...
Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually...
A report in Science magazine in 1990 exposed the absurdity of our publish-or-perish academic culture. It focused on citation rates – the frequency with which my article is referred to by my...
Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the...
Keith Douglas in the desert, 1942. Keith Douglas was 24 when he was killed in action, in 1944, and although quite a few of his poems had by then appeared in anthologies and magazines, he was...
Anthony Powell, suave in his interwar Morris Minor. Reviewers are always sternly instructed to check page proofs against finished copies of books, and I do, I will. But the proofs of Anthony...
5 January. A lorry delivers some stone lintels at No. 61. The driver is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly-coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading she...
A remarkably high proportion of those who now teach and write about the modern Middle East in this country were taught by Albert Hourani. He encouraged the historians he supervised to take an...