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 ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

Angry advocate of violence and sombre prophet of the anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon was also a natty dresser and enjoyed a gin-and-tonic. A black, middle-class psychiatrist from Martinique, who ...

Perfectly timed for the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic narrative of the Hundred Years’ War takes the story from Richard II’s death in 1399 ...

I n the summer of 1897, two aspiring Greek poets, who were also brothers, ended their brief tour of Europe by spending three days in Paris. For the younger brother, Constantine Cavafy, those three ...

Book Reviews by subject: Literature and Literary Criticism & Feminism December 2021 Issue Martha Rampton Wave Formations Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1950–2020 ...

There has been nothing in English historical writing over recent decades to match the intensity of interest in the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. The foundations were laid a century or so ...

Recently the BBC television presenter Jeremy Paxman published a book on the British Empire intended to answer the question of ‘what ruling the world did to the British’ (as his subtitle put it). Of ...

Jonathan Bate has a true novelist’s gift for scene setting and story telling. He spots interesting details and connections overlooked by previous writers, allowing his lively imagination to play ...

Alan Garner called his grandmother Mrs E Paminondas on account of the story she would tell schoolchildren during the air-raid drills about a boy called E Paminondas who ‘never did have the sense’ he ...

Robert Reid follows his acclaimed Land of Lost Content, about the Luddite revolt of 1812, with this fascinating account of Peterloo – a cavalry charge into a crowd in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, in ...

Artists, poets, novelists, dramatists and musicians don’t really need to know the history of their respective disciplines; nor do scientists. Philosophers do. They are, as is often said, required to ...