Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

The Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

Maurice Oldfield was chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6) from 1973 to 1978. Summoned from retirement by Margaret Thatcher to become security coordinator in Northern Ireland, ...

When, in 1982, Cibella Borges protested against her suspension from the police force for posing nude for a magazine, she insisted that her action had constituted no crime. 'She said she feared "the ...

The first of these two novels concerned with the lives of old men and women in care homes has already achieved the status of international bestseller. It isn’t difficult to see why. Hendrik Groen (a ...

The English author who perhaps most closely resembled Stefan Zweig was his near-contemporary Somerset Maugham. Maugham lived longer, and wrote more full-length novels and fewer biographical and ...

‘Hiking with Nietzsche’ sounds like the premise of a darkly humorous sitcom or the punishment for an existential crime. Rhetorically ferocious, intellectually conceited and, for much of his life, ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

‘It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there,’ wrote William Carlos Williams. Debates about poetry have a habit of standing in for larger ...