Alfred, Lord Tennyson is practically a byword for old-fashioned Victorian grandeur, rarely pictured without a cravat and a serious beard. Seamus Perry tries to picture him as a younger man.

WHEN I was once rashly defending Susan Chitty against Michael Holroyd’s attack on her for plagiarism, I was effectively silenced on being shown The Great Donkey Walk, by Susan Chitty and her husband, ...

Since Goethe lived to be eighty-two, his life provides an almost unmanageable amount of material for the biographer. Matthew Bell cuts a path through this forest by offering an intellectual biography.

When Empire, Incorporated comes out in paperback, it will be able to boast about providing the historical background to what we have recently come to know as one of the world’s most inept as well as ...

In 1962, Martin Heidegger went on a cruise to the Aegean. Going to Greece had not been an easy decision. Seven years earlier he had got so far as to buy train and boat tickets; when the enormity of ...

In July 1324, Sultan Musa of Mali rocked up in Cairo, together with an entourage of over ten thousand slaves and retainers, staying as the guest of the city’s Mamluk governor as he passed through ...

The far Left and the far Right have agreed about few things in English history, but one of them is the iniquity of the Revolution of 1688–9, which mainstream opinion credits with the emergence of ...

Although his literary works are by no means uniformly successful, Peter Ackroyd may safely be described as an author possessed of genius, and had he died before attaining middle age (like Bruce ...

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

‘Dornford Yates’ was the pen-name of novelist William Mercer, 1885–1960. Of all the authors whose fiction has got about my wits, none has tempted me so clamorously to find out about his factual life.

In the Thirties, fascism and Communism fought a battle of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Common to both ideologies are contempt for liberal democracy, belief in the primacy of the state over the ...

If one were to hazard a guess as to the largest nature reserve in Europe, Chernobyl would be an unlikely contender. And yet, over the last thirty years, a vast area closed off to all but a few ...