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 ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

The day before he died, Sir Jack Cohen, founder of Tesco, paid a surprise visit to a big new store in Essex. After a triumphal tour in his wheelchair, he asked to be taken up to the balcony ...

HAVING SERVED ONLY half of his four-year sentence for perjury, Jefrey Archer was released from prison last July. In celebration, Macmillan Audio Books is releasing freshly abridged titles. This one ...

MARGARET FORSTER IS the author of this fictional diary, a revelation which disappointed this reader; a compulsive diarist myself, I had thought it was genuine. Forster's invented diarist is a Miss ...

This large book is both rewarding and demanding. It offers information in abundance and, like Sir Barry Cunliffe’s previous publications from OUP, it is beautifully written and illustrated. But what ...

The publicity team at Frederick Forsyth’s publisher has done a good job of drumming up interest in his new memoir by focusing on the question of whether he was ever a member of the Secret Intelligence ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

The paradox at the centre of High Fidelity is that while pop songs almost always involve love, passion and raw feeling, the kind of men who are most intensely addicted to pop music tend to be a bunch ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...