When I was military attaché in Rome, an Alpini general once asked me who were the ten greatest British generals. I replied that there would not be much argument about the top five but that opinion ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

Eco's thoughts on his astonishingly successful novel were originally published in an Italian journal in 1983, and subsequently reprinted as a free supplement to the Italian paperback edition of the ...

There can’t be many people who care for literature, for all round excellence, who wouldn’t be moved by the fact that Wole Soyinka has, at last, been awarded the Nobel prize. In my opinion he entered ...

Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology.

According to An Economic History of the English Garden, between 1820 and the present day, 15,652 gardening books have been published in the UK alone. That’s not the most astonishing number in this ...

Busy researching a biography of Cyril Connolly, I was surprised to come across a note from George Orwell to his old school friend suggesting that they should review each other’s most recent books on ...

The uncomfortably intense manner, the thick foreign accent, the dropping of the names of influential friends, the ostentatious spending with no obvious sign of steady income, the insistence to anyone ...

Peter Hennessy begins the third volume of his splendid history of postwar Britain with a vivid description of the secret bunker complex, created in the late 1950s and early 1960s near his boyhood home ...

The great financial crisis of 2007–9 was no end of a lesson for the economics profession. Prior to it, hardly any economist drew attention to the global imbalances that had built up in the early 2000s ...

In this lively and engaging book, Margaret Jacob, one of the most distinguished scholars of the Enlightenment, navigates a complex topic, over which there has been much debate and considerable ...