Primo Levi (1919–87), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75), Italo Calvino (1923–85) – and Leonardo Sciascia (1921–89), the subject ...

The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson ...

The old Left–Right divide still exists in France, of course, but its former significance has greatly declined. The parties ...

Romantic fiction has deep roots. In a description of King Arthur’s court written around 1155, the poet Wace presented his ...

The Kremlin’s Long Reach - The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy by Josh Ireland ...

The European was the Marquis de Morès – explorer, adventurer and far-right demagogue – who aimed to forestall British ...

Passage to a Better World - The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein; Revolutions: A New History by Donald Sassoon ...

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) gets top billing in the subtitle of Hard Streets but he’s not the star of the show. The book begins with and is built around an earlier rags-to-riches tale and its wider ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

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 ...

‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, ...