In researching material for my book on the Waughs, Fathers and Sons, I came across the obscure name of S P B Mais many times, for over a long lifespan S P B had, at various junctures, earned his keep ...

Contemplating the tomb of John Keats for the readers of Irish Monthly, Oscar Wilde swooningly lamented ‘this divine boy’ who was ‘a Priest of Beauty slain before his time’. Critics haven’t spoken that ...

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, ...

DAVID PEACE BEGAN the first novel of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, about the Ripper killings and other grim goings-on in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s, with a quotation from Harry S Truman: ...

John Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity is everything a popular mathematics book should be: gentle, chatty, anecdotal and full of mind-aching equations. It is a history of algebra – the study of number ...

If a cow said, ‘Don’t eat me’, we wouldn’t. We seem to regard the capacity for language (by which we mean our kind of language) as evidence of moral significance. But do animals talk? Many traditions ...

Isaiah Berlin liked to recall an encounter at a party in the 1930s with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. A fellow guest challenged Weizmann’s devotion to the ideal of a Jewish state: ‘You are a ...

Most political figures come and go. Nigel Farage, in contrast, seems always to be around, close to the centre of the political stage. Sometimes he is leading a political party. Occasionally he is ...

Publishing used to be a dirty business. I’m talking not only about the ink-stained fingers of disreputable writers, but also about the filthy hands of those who actually put the words on the page: the ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ is one of those well-known phrases whose deeper significance is strangely elusive. I first heard it as a child, while living in what was then called Tanganyika in the ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...