This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

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 ...

‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

Simon Mawer’s new novel, about a female secret agent, is billed as a good old-fashioned adventure story, albeit one which is subtly subverted by the presence of a female heroine in a masculine world.

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

In the summer of 1897, two aspiring Greek poets, who were also brothers, ended their brief tour of Europe by spending three days in Paris. For the younger brother, Constantine Cavafy, those three days ...

Whether looking down from above or up from below, Napoleon must be well satisfied with the attention he has been receiving two hundred years after his fall. He has recently been the subject of new ...

In March 1942, while working in wartime London as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming proposed the creation of a tiny but dedicated front-line unit of ...

Max Adams tells his readers very early on that ‘the real Dark Age in British history can be found in Book I of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History’. It is this lacuna, the period between 580 and 710, that ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...

Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...