The question matters greatly when assessing Tom McTague’s Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution, ...

For my money, there is no more captivating view in all Italy than the vast panorama of the harbour of Syracuse, framed by its majestic, honey-coloured Baroque buildings. The city’s origins go back to ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

When I went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1960, freshmen (we were all men) were presented with a potted history of the place written almost forty years earlier by its then master, Arthur ...

Certain names carry with them the whiff of brimstone. In the world of bibliophiles and booksellers, perhaps no name is more sulphurous than that of Thomas James Wise. Celebrated in his lifetime as the ...

‘You wicked man! Whatever am I going to do with you?’ ‘You angel, you angel fluff on toast!’ Years on, I can still hear the historian Jeremy Catto’s booming voice, just as I often reach for his ...

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had ...

Giulia Caminito’s The Bitter Water of the Lake is a claustrophobic novel. Gaia, its narrator, begins life in a house that measures five metres by four. Her mother, Antonia, clears the courtyard of ...

Imagine a man in late middle age, fastidiously dressed, his long face ‘creased and dry’, his ‘chameleon-like’ eyes watching behind round glasses. Picture him walking the streets of old Alexandria, ...

Note the subtitle: ‘Half a Lifetime’. Take that, A Year in Provence. To write about la France profonde with authority, you have to put in the hours. Adam Thorpe and his family moved from England to ...

‘The moon wanes and waxes, it is never steadfast’, wrote the author of Ancrene Wisse, a 13th-century guide for English anchoresses, ‘and signifies therefore worldly things that are as the moon ever ...