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 ...

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, ...

No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, ...

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 ...

Do you know your dandies from your petit-maîtres? Could you tell a coxcomb from a Regency buck, a swell or a fop? As Peter McNeil’s Pretty Gentlemen efficiently illustrates, masculinity was a muddled ...

The story of the Younghusband Mission, or invasion of Tibet, has been told many times. Within a year of reaching Lhasa five of its participants wrote what we would now call instant books. They ...

Recently I interviewed Tristan Garcia, one of France’s most vaunted young novelists, and mentioned that I’d been teaching Michel Tournier’s The Erl-King. His eyes took on sudden light and we spent the ...

Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

Retired politicians have cornered the market in biographies of great leaders. These books annoy historians because they pinch their research and sell more copies. They tend to be uncritically admiring ...

The story surrounding the composition and publication of Crown Jewel affords an interesting example of changing literary taste in the last half century. Its author, a Trinidadian of French Creole ...

Veils of cigarette smoke frequently cloud the faces of the jazz musicians framed by Herman Leonard’s camera. A dozen of Leonard’s celebrated photographs appear in the pages of Jazz, a new history by ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...