Biography
The caring doctress
Mary Seacole may not have qualified as a nurse in the modern sense, but British troops benefited greatly from her healing skills, says Andrew Lycett
‘The Rothschilds of the East’
David Abulafia admires the shrewdness, generosity and panache of the Sassoons over many generations
True devotion
The 20th century was an amazing time for Russian pianists, and the worse things got, politically and militarily, the more…
Force of nature
Philip Hensher describes how John Constable’s energy and imagination freed British art from the constraints of the past
The heart of the matter
Kathleen Stock describes how four women undergraduates in 1940s Oxford challenged an arid, modish philosophy
Born tough
Elaine Showalter celebrates the grit and wisdom of Elizabeth Hardwick
Her own master
‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…
A right old song and dance
All the questions around Britney Spears can be condensed into this one: who should we blame? For a long time,…
Selling the dream
Love her or loathe her, Enid Blyton and the safe, sunny world she cleverly marketed will remain a publishing phenomenon, says Sam Leith
Good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
The bourgeois surrealist
René Magritte’s life, so outwardly respectable, was as full of surprises as his art, says Philip Hensher
No fairytale
I once stood on a Dublin street with Shane MacGowan and watched little old ladies who can’t ever have been…
A tantalising mystery
‘Victorian’ stuck, and ‘Edwardian’ too. But ‘Georgian’, as an adjective associated with the next monarch in line, never caught on.…
Titans of tennis
Louis MacNeice once wrote that if you want to know what chasing the Grail is like, ask Lancelot not Galahad.…
‘I’m not a vampire’
If you’ve only heard one thing about Peter Thiel (and many have heard nothing at all) it is that he…
Factory boss
To many people Tony Wilson was a bigmouth Mancunian, brash music impresario and jobbing television presenter. But to the generation…
In the heart of the night
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
Feat of clay
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…
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…
