‘Biography’, contended the Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton, ‘is a poor way of writing history’. He believed that ‘no individual has ever dominated his age to the point where it becomes sensible to ...

First, a confession. Ali Smith has been a heroine of mine since she eschewed professional theatre companies and chose instead a bunch of schoolchildren to adapt her novel Hotel World for the stage.

‘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.

‘What London needs is a good shaking up,’ remarked the maverick American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge upon arriving in England with his dream of opening the capital’s grandest department store. The ...

In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Like the Thatcherite Tories he supported in his later years, Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, has now undergone two decades of detoxification. The contamination was quick and calamitous. Anthony ...

Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

The allure of reinterpreting the myths and legends of antiquity seems undiminished. There are almost too many to count, recent examples ranging from Colm Tóibín’s House of Names, a retelling of the ...

SALLEY VICKERS IS an audacious writer. who dares to tread where few in this apostate age would wish to venture. At a time when the Church of England is struggling to persuade its dwindling ...

The great attraction of the diary form for aspirant authors is its apparent simplicity. Many who would quail at the challenge of producing a readable novel or poem will embark quite confidently on ...