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 ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

Ben Hutchinson: Voilà un Homme! - Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski (Translated by David Dollenmayer) ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

John Gray, a political philosopher who spent much of his academic career attacking the Enlightenment, has in recent years turned his gaze on his entire species, whom he has renamed Homo rapiens. Since ...

David Kynaston: East End Chronicles - Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth; Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott ...

In 1848, the wave of political uprisings taking place across Europe reached the Frankfurt street where the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was living, comfortably, off money from his father’s shipping ...

The Smile Jamaica Concert, scheduled for 5 December 1976, was intended as a celebration of Jamaican unity: in the National Heroes Park in Kingston, the most famous living Jamaican, Bob Marley, would ...

Nineteen sixty-three was a calamitous year for Harold Macmillan. First, General de Gaulle pulled the rug from under him by vetoing British entry into Europe. Then the Profumo affair turned him – with ...

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 ...

Time Out, for instance, is characteristically anaemic. Despite its agitprop listings any pretensions to ‘alternative’ status look decidedly flimsy as it gaily retails some more Sloane Ranger jinkettes ...

Professor Charles Esdaile, the author of an excellent history of the Peninsular War, has now followed it up with an even better history of the Napoleonic Wars from the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens ...