This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

Frankly, it was a triumph. Eight hundred people had gathered in the Barclays MegaCash Pavilion at the Hay Festival to hear me talk about my latest book. I was a little nervous, as I am accustomed to ...

The Smile Jamaica Concert, scheduled for 5 December 1976, was intended as a celebration of Jamaican unity: in the National Heroes Park in Kingston, the most famous living Jamaican, Bob Marley, would ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

In April 1591, six royal ships under the command of Lord Thomas Howard left Plymouth to intercept the annual Spanish flota, laden with New World treasure, off the Azores. Unfortunately for Howard, his ...

Stephan Thernstrom, 56, a professor at Harvard University for 25 years, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars of the history of race relations in America. He has tenure. He has won prizes and ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Daniel Woodrell’s novels set in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri have won him critical acclaim, and the genre he writes in, coined by the author as ‘country noir’, has quite a following in the United ...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel begins confidingly: You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles ...

Tintin, wonderfully, survives and thrives. The centenary of Hergé’s birth approaches, the books are still in print in countless languages, and soon Steven Spielberg’s Tintin film will be out, a ...

Imagine a situation in which, for thirty-five years, the English experienced unprecedented levels of engagement with Continental Europe. In consequence, they came to enjoy greater prosperity than they ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...