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 ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

he King Arthur of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, written between 1856 and 1885, is the King Arthur of Malory and the French romance tradition before him: Lancelot and Guinevere, Mordred and Merlin, ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

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 ...

William Trevor, the much-admired writer of more than thirty novels and collections of short stories, died in 2016. He would have been ninety this year, and to remember and celebrate him this ...

It was not easy to be the wife of Thomas Carlyle. A woman with a less original mind than Jane Welsh might have been crushed into insignificance by a man who, while probably never consummating their ...

Behind the Lawrence Legend: the title suggests debunking, iconoclasm, the examination of dirty laundry – another contribution, that is, to the lively tradition of Lawrence-bashing that began with ...

To what extent does an author control the lives of his characters? This is the question at the heart of J M Coetzee’s new novel. But alongside it lies another, almost as intriguing: why is the Nobel ...

Imagine you’re a biographer and you’re attending one of those literary parties which, even in these straightened times, speckle December like a light falling of snow. You find yourself in conversation ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...