‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

It’s probably the most quoted slogan in feminism and certainly among the best-known theses in all philosophy: ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.’ On the dust jacket of Kate Kirkpatrick’s incisive ...

Somalia’s Al Shabaab is the most resilient militant Islamist insurgency after the Afghan Taliban. It has proved nimble and adaptable as well as tenacious. It has recovered from blunders, infighting ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

A game played by all of us who work at the literary end of the book trade, and I expect by mere consumers too, is: spot the real classic, the author who will be widely read in two hundred years’ time.

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 ...

The bibliography of Philip Mansel’s new life of Louis XIV is as impressive as I expected it to be. It lists every kind of history and biography, as well as unpublished manuscripts, newspapers of the ...

Henry James returned to America in 1904 with three objectives: to see his brother William, to deliver a series of lectures on Balzac, and to gather material for a pair of books about modern America.

The wars of the English in fifteenth-century France have never found their historian. In England, the stigma of failure hangs over the whole period: a tale of triumphant beginnings, followed by missed ...

The public apparition known as ‘Sir Roy Strong’ has been created partly by himself (his insistence on wearing those funny hats and drawling his exaggerated likes and dislikes on television) and partly ...

Posterity hasn’t had much trouble knowing what to do with Emily Dickinson; it has revered her as a poet and sentimentalised her life. The reclusive spinster published fewer than a dozen of almost ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...