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 ...

Julie Kavanagh is the ideal biographer for Rudolph Nureyev. She dispels the fog of glamour, showing the dancer and choreographer relentlessly, obsessively working. She explains clearly, but with a ...

Spinoza, according to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, is ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’. As a natural consequence of his ethical supremacy, Russell adds, ...

Earlier this year I acquired a stuffed toy, a fluffy foot-long sea otter that I named Athena. I usually fall asleep with her tucked under my chin. Living alone, and with a travel schedule that keeps ...

This consistently entertaining and stimulating history of opera gets off to cracking start with a quotation from a doleful letter to The Times written in 1853 by a gentleman identifying himself only ...

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is ...

The old-style publisher’s memoir, which reached its high-water mark between about 1920 and 1950, was a relatively staid affair. The publisher who wrote it – say, Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, author ...

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 ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Of all those big American novelists who emerged after the Second World War, John Updike has been the most consistent, the most productive, and probably the most pleasurable. A writer’s writer, he has ...

Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...