Biography
Blood is thicker than water
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
Unheeded warnings
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
No saintly innocent
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
An isolated misfit
Why did W.G. Sebald risk his reputation by telling such strange, repeated lies, wonders Lucasta Miller
A fevered mind
Philip Hensher finds Robert Burton’s perception of the world and the human condition endlessly fascinating
A true bohemian
It is well established that artists are not always the nicest people. On the surface, the life of the model,…
An unlikely tragic hero
In this Age of Trump, as we cast about for some moment in American history that might help us make…
Still the Fab Five
In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously,…
The man who wasn’t there
Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974
The chaser and the chaste
Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus,…
Sublime strangeness
Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were…
Tortured genius
Andrew Motion describes the inner turmoil of the neglected poet Ivor Gurney
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…
