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 ...

James Lovelock will be eighty-seven this year. For the last forty-five years he has been an entirely independent scientist, unattached to any institution. He is qualified in medicine, chemistry and ...

While on holiday three years ago in Taormina, Sicily, I found in a souvenir shop swimming trunks in the Italian colours with a picture of Mussolini in full military fig. The bathers bore the caption ...

‘To capture the fish is not all of the fishing,’ insisted that dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey; and, whilst that may be true enough, I feel my spirits sink whenever I see an angling book promoted ...

‘I am not an Afro-pessimist,’ writes Paul Theroux, looking back on a journey that has taken him from the slums of Cape Town to the musseques of Luanda. You could have fooled me. The Last Train to Zona ...

In her second novel, Mary Lawson returns to the fictional setting of her first – Crow Lake. The lake, in the far north of Canada, proves an apt metaphor for her narrative: ‘the silvery ever-moving ...

MARGARET FORSTER IS the author of this fictional diary, a revelation which disappointed this reader; a compulsive diarist myself, I had thought it was genuine. Forster's invented diarist is a Miss ...

This is a thoughtful and important book by a first-rate historian, and deserves to become required reading for those who seek to advance their understanding of the Somme beyond the historiographical ...

Reading the publisher's blurb for this novel, I'm disappointed. It promises an 'exciting new departure' from Maggie O'Farrell's previous work, the best book you'll read all year, and so on. 'Exciting' ...

FEW PSYCHIATRIC SYMPTOMS are as remarkable as the conviction that one's thoughts and actions are being controlled by some mysterious, malevolent machine. One of the earliest and most colourful ...

FRIENDSHIP, FOR ALL its delights, is often seen as a poor relation of passionate love. It has long had what one might call its 'romantic' and 'ethical' critics. The romantic critic (like Proust) finds ...

There was a time, now long past, when English novelists, with E M Forster in the forefront, would write of cultivated, respectable spinsters seduced out of the emotional frigidity of their lives by ...