A Britain without the South Asian British is now almost unthinkable. With a few exceptions – farming, fishing and the armed forces spring to mind – there are few sectors of UK life where the ...

The ultimate purpose of what is now only the second least reputable literary prize going is to render itself redundant by discouraging poorly written, gratuitous or unnecessary passages of sexual ...

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 ...

In 1944-45, after his suicide attempts and with trial for collaboration an increasingly likely possibility, Drieu La Rochelle blamed his inability to live up to the fascist ideal on his class ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as ...

I have often heard it said that Lt-Gen Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, provided the model for Evelyn Waugh’s immortal Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Carton de Wiart won his Cross, and was ...

The jacket of Fred Halliday’s book shows a photograph of a characteristic group of Islamic Afghan rebels, sub-machine guns and rifles in hand, standing atop a captured Soviet armoured vehicle, east of ...

The ellipsis in the title of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood says it all. It confides a doubt or hesitation, or introduces a rupture that we have to wishfully leap across. Yes, Quentin Tarantino’s ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

When Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec began to paint in Paris in the 1880s, class and gender divisions were beginning to break down. Subversive entertainment in the new cafés was part of the cause. As he ...

The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened. @StephenSmithWDS wonders how ...