On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, ...

Despite the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and latterly Fukushima, we seem to be witnessing a global nuclear revival. The Chinese recently increased estimated new-build ...

All but a few crumbs of the available archive materials have been studied, every political and psychological theory has been applied, filters of every colour – whitewash, deepest red, pitch black – ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

It is odd to read a novel one simultaneously admires and loathes. The admiration is for the book’s intelligence, lack of sentimentality and often extraordinary phrase-making: the loathing is for the ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

It is the end of harvest for a small, tight-knit community who depend on the land to survive. The poor yield should be their prime concern but one night the local manor house is set on fire, its ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...