Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting...
Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One...
Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and...
There were fears of revolutionary violence in Paris in the spring of 1773. The police tried to quell the disturbances and make those responsible account for their actions, but they had no...
‘If the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason,’ wrote Christopher Hitchens last year on the dust jacket of Harvey Kaye’s recent book...
The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy,...
Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic...
There is a terrible relentlessness about Thatcher’s Fortunes, a chronicle that can be easily summed up. Mark Thatcher, talentless, and so graceless that the most charming thing about him...
In 1940 Empson was back in England, having spent much of the previous decade in Japan and China. His arrival in China had coincided with the Japanese invasion and the resulting southward...
Sixty-one years ago, two miserable German youths were crouching in a rainy hole under a groundsheet. Around them, in the same field behind barbed wire, thousands of other prisoners of war waited...
A lot of the stories, truthful or otherwise, about Picasso are as colourful as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that...
‘It’s all because of our fucking surname,’ exclaimed the exasperated Valerie Hobson, the wife of Jack Profumo, when ‘the Profumo scandal’ was resurrected many years...
Literary biography is one of the background noises of our age. It’s a decent, friendly sort of hum, like the Sunday papers or chatter on a train. It gives the punters a bit of history and a...
For a schoolboy at Winchester in the 1950s, it was difficult to avoid the dramatic tombstone in the college cloisters. The memorial carries the simple legend WAVELL, deeply etched into the...
As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up,...
Elizabeth Smart was browsing one day between the wars in the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. Young, blonde and original, unclaimed by her Ottawa upbringing or her mother’s social...
In 1968 my next-door neighbour in our ward at the Maudsley Hospital for the psychologically bewildered or the just plain cross was a woman from Wales in her early twenties who had slowly been...
This memoir takes its title and its epigraph from Wordsworth: I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart. The poet laureate thus...