A FEW YEARS ago, I mentioned to a London Jewish friend that I was writing an article about the Irish diaspora. ‘Diaspora?’ he shouted. ‘We’re the ones with the diaspora. Is there nothing the bloody ...

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The most consulted file in the National Archive is the Jack the Ripper dossier. So much work has been done in this field we might wonder if there is anything worthwhile left to say. However, the ...

Biographers of T S Eliot face a number of challenges, not least the marked disinclination of their subject to having his biography written at all. When, in the early 1960s, a scholar wrote an account ...

In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his ...

Architectural publishing is not an endeavour that is routinely associated with bloated displays of machismo. Yet over the past few years there have appeared a number of books defined more by their ...

The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid is a fan of forensic scientists. She points out that they ‘are willing to engage with the darkest and most frightening aspect of human behaviour on a daily basis ...

Regina Porter’s remarkable debut novel leads us on a journey through America’s mottled history, beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War and ending in the early years of Barack Obama’s ...

Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology.

Some novels are hard to review, some are easy. Some are so difficult you don’t know where to begin…but, then, a gift: the author saves you the trouble by more or less reviewing the book for you. So ...

Had Dorothy Hodgkin been a man, she would have been the subject of a spate of full-length hagiographies by now: Tariq Ali would have weighed in with ‘Pugwash Warrior: Fighter for Peace’; Professor ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...