Since Goethe lived to be eighty-two, his life provides an almost unmanageable amount of material for the biographer. Matthew Bell cuts a path through this forest by offering an intellectual biography.

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. 15th-century news transmission was a slow business, reliant ...

As its subtitle suggests, The Discovery of Britain takes in a vast sweep of time, although the focus is of course on the ...

The monarch is still the ultimate constitutional longstop, with power to dismiss a rogue prime minister and to deny an ...

What do we think of when we think of blondes? Perhaps Scandinavia, where blonde hair is commonplace, or iconic blonde stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. Sexy Swedes, brash Americans or ...

As the historian John Blair points out, corpse killing has been a feature of human society for millennia, and with good ...

When war broke out, he joined the British Expeditionary Force as a despatcher, driving his own car with a machine gun mounted ...

In his early thirties, Merlin Holland went to the launch of an anthology of work by Rebecca West at Searcys restaurant in London. There, a certain actress took it upon herself to introduce him to the ...

The book ranges quite widely – taking the story back into the 1960s as well as into the 1980s and the early career of Osama ...

In this book the admirable Juliet Nicolson takes the view that women in particular are the repositories for secrets and, ultimately, the channels for their release. I’m not sure this is true. Men have ...

When, in a classic scene in probably the smartest cartoon series in history, the notoriously idiotic Homer Simpson says, ‘everyone is stupid except me’, the joke is as much on us as it is on him. At ...

Longstanding readers of Literary Review.might recall the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul. In 2003, after an argument with its manager, my late friend and co-author of a guide to Afghanistan, Matthew ...