In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson: Heads Will Roll - The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution by David Andress ...

Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, ...

The year 2016, the anteroom to the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917, has already brought us several books that, in various ways, speak to the epochal events that brought down a ...

Helen Pearson: Where Does It All Go? - What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research by Jonathan Gershuny & Oriel Sullivan ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

Khaled Hosseini’s third novel is an exquisitely rendered study of familial bonds. Opening with the fierce sibling loyalty between Abdullah and his sister, Pari, which acts as the linchpin for a ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

Who needs another biography of Laurence Olivier? I have just counted eight on my shelf, not to mention the memoirs of his third wife Joan Plowright and those of his elder son Tarquin, his own two ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

‘Dornford Yates’ was the pen-name of novelist William Mercer, 1885–1960. Of all the authors whose fiction has got about my wits, none has tempted me so clamorously to find out about his factual life.

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...