Not long after J G Ballard’s death, I was exchanging emails with Mike Moorcock, one of Ballard’s oldest and best friends. The avuncular old gent at whose feet Will Self and Iain Sinclair sat, Mike ...

One doesn’t need modern tools of computational analysis to determine that the most common words in Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses are ‘mama’ and ‘papa’. The stories it contains of the ...

Sometime during the 1970s the witch was transformed from a black-hatted crone to a wise medicine women. The spell was cast by radical feminist historians, determined to find their own heroic ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

PETER ACKROYD SEEMS to be everywhere you look at the moment. His TV series on London has only just left our screens; a short biography of Chaucer was published a few months ago; and it doesn't seem ...

No one does scandals quite like the French. It is not so much the who-did-what-and-to-whom that makes them gripping, but the tremors they seem to send through the whole society. And still they go on.

Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh and she was known to her family and neighbours as Beth, the unmarried daughter who stayed at home in Inverness to care for her widowed father. Only in the south ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...