Some of us find it remarkably difficult simply to go for a walk. We need an excuse, a project, a literary precedent. We don’t want our wanderings, or our accounts of them, to be simply strolls in the ...

When asked in 1972 about the significance of the French Revolution, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai reportedly quipped, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ But while the meaning of the revolution in France could ...

Peter Lanyon was forty-six years old when he died from injuries sustained while crash-landing his glider in a field in Devon in August 1964. The paintings he had completed that summer were some of his ...

In the opening pages of this book, the first volume in a monumental new history of Britain’s experience of the ‘long’ Second World War (the second volume will cover the period 1942–7, ending with ...

This is a strange book: odd title; peculiar mishmash of personal anecdotes, scientific evidence and folksy homilies about how to bring up children; and strange in its lack of any discernible structure ...

Arthur Balfour is a daunting prospect for the biographer because of his openly expressed doubts about the whole genre. As he once confided to a friend, he could tolerate criticism and was vain enough ...

A sepulchral castle, a despotic lord, a guiltless maiden and a spectral, troubled antihero – these were the ingredients of the gothic novel at the high midnight of its popularity. Catherine Bailey’s ...

Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

A popular new literary genre has emerged in recent years, comprising books that interweave authors’ memoirs and reflections on the books that have accompanied them throughout their lives. In Katharine ...

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

Nikolaus Pevsner means only one thing to millions of people: The Buildings of England. The series is synonymous with him, or vice versa. Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s Pevsner, later ...