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, ...

My Life, Our Times is a Big Clunking Fist of a political autobiography. It demonstrates Gordon Brown’s strengths and exposes his frailties. The book is well written, sometimes drily humorous and at ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...

‘My books are simply autobiographies,’ Mark Twain once confessed. True of most American writers, it seems especially true of a man who, as Ron Powers argues in this magisterial biography, ‘found a ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

When, in 1842, Queen Victoria saw Jenny, an orangutan that had recently arrived at London Zoo, she is reported to have commented that she found the ape ‘disagreeably human’. Like Charles Darwin, who ...

The Italian Renaissance has been exercising its magnetic power over tourists, scholars, composers, playwrights, artists and novelists since its beginning. Indeed, there is now held to have been a ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

It’s probably the most quoted slogan in feminism and certainly among the best-known theses in all philosophy: ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.’ On the dust jacket of Kate Kirkpatrick’s incisive ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

Augustus’s victory over Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC left him in control of the Roman world after a period of civil war that stretched back to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon ...