Biography
Otherworldly genius
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…
The great rule breaker
Philip Hensher describes D.H. Lawrence’s restless search of a new way of life
The city of the plains
‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander…
Boy racer
‘Who do you think you are — Stirling Moss?’ a genially menacing traffic cop would ask a hapless motorway transgressor.…
Six of the best
Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced…
Monstrous conceit
If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops.…
Chiselled beauty
‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, to attain the mystical perception that Blake advocated, requires a concentrated,…
More grand projects
Not content with imposing his will on nations, Napoleon tried to subdue nature too, says David Crane
A natural sensualist
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
Quite contrary
This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…
Apostle of modernism
Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law…
Less than angelic
Vicars, tea parties and village fetes were a far cry from Barbara Pym’s early enthusiasms, Philip Hensher reveals
The great adventuress
At the masquerade celebrating the end of the War of Austrian Succession no one could take their eyes off the…
The voice of a generation
Bob Dylan didn’t just assimilate the Great American Songbook – he vastly increased its size and variety, says Andrew Motion
Cat on hot bricks
The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…
Five intrepid women
I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I…
Stark, intense honesty
Philip Roth was prepared to stare the soul resolutely in the face – and for that he can be forgiven most things, says David Baddiel
Celebrity gangster
Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s…
Crying in the wilderness
Even Edward Said would not have claimed to be ‘the 20th century’s most celebrated intellectual’. But neither was he ‘Professor of Terror’, says Justin Marozzi
The last of old England
Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of…
Jolly good company
In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory…
And then there were three
Lara Feigel tells of the passion, pain and sexual exploitation involved in Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with a young married scholar
Missing the big picture
In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…
Reinventing the superhero
If Marvel characters seem dysfunctional, just look at their creators, says Dorian Lynskey
A thoroughly modern Romantic
Keats is a much stranger poet than we tend to realise – who shocked his first readers by his vulgarity and gross indecency, says Philip Hensher
