Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out ...

Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

An ‘Arch-Mediocrity who presided rather than ruled’ over a ‘Cabinet of Mediocrities’ – Benjamin Disraeli’s sneering dismissal of Lord Liverpool, prime minister during the turbulent years from 1812 to ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

Behind the Lawrence Legend: the title suggests debunking, iconoclasm, the examination of dirty laundry – another contribution, that is, to the lively tradition of Lawrence-bashing that began with ...

Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) is a wonderful, horrible film. It follows the adventures of Johnny, a Mancunian Raskolnikov, introduced to us in the first scene committing a vicious rape. Repellent yet ...

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

Best-selling author Robert Lacey begins his fascinating history with Cheddar Man, who lived 9,000 years ago when England was still joined to Europe. He ends with the discovery of DNA and thus creates ...

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) has been the subject of two different sets of misconceptions. After early literary success in the West his reputation dwindled almost to nothing. He had earlier won ...

This is a splendid and thoroughly absorbing book, one to read quickly at an enthusiastic gallop, and then to return to reading with care, relishing the observations and speculations which Ackroyd ...

That title is misleading, as is the identical declaration of trade on the poet's tombstone. Larkin wrote, and wrote well, but he did not write for a living. Those of his generation (to my shock I wake ...