It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that ...

At a dinner party recently, the conversation turned to personal heroes. I chose Primo Levi – the Italian Jewish chemist turned writer who survived Auschwitz to immortalise it in his books, If This Is ...

Such is the cult of the celebrity author in contemporary publishing that it is easy for a work of real talent to be smothered, or swept away altogether, by the tide of hype that inevitably surrounds ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

‘Your immortal soul!’ my father used to shout, brandishing his fist. His lament was also a threat – to me, his teenage daughter, that I stood to lose my soul if I lost my Catholic faith. Nowadays, of ...

This is a timely book. It reminds us of a particularly shameful moment in our modern history, when fascism, despite having just been defeated in a war in which millions lost their lives, once more ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

The Rt Hon Sir Oliver Letwin has written one of the most important books of the year. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable. It’s important in the same way that an injection or ...

Ever since the United States assumed the mantle ‘leader of the free world’, in the acrid carnage of the Second World War, there has been a debate as to whether America is an empire in all but name, as ...

Inverting the old cliché, Christopher Hitchens said, ‘Everyone has a book in them and that, in most cases, is where it should stay.’ The journalist and satirist Karl Kraus agreed: journalists, ...