Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...

Susan Bridgen is a rare creature among Tudor historians writing for a general audience. Her style is spare, her manner cool and impersonal. Not for her the luxuriant prose, the passionate engagement ...

Reviewers may be daunted by a book’s erudition, but it is rare to feel intimidated by the violence of the language. Chris Bryant’s Entitled is disturbing partly because it is written in a ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

Arthur Miller seems an ideal subject for a biographer. Works such as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible have a resonance that extends well beyond America and the era in which he wrote them. As ...

I WELL REMEMBER the shock of excitement and the odd feeling of recognition I felt when I encountered Robert Browning half a century ago. When you are trying on different selves in adolescence, ...

Of all the many and wretched women processed through these pages, the luckiest is surely Mildred Martin, who supervised Roth in ‘independent reading’ at Bucknell University. She admired him and has ...