Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

This is a splendid and thoroughly absorbing book, one to read quickly at an enthusiastic gallop, and then to return to reading with care, relishing the observations and speculations which Ackroyd ...

That title is misleading, as is the identical declaration of trade on the poet's tombstone. Larkin wrote, and wrote well, but he did not write for a living. Those of his generation (to my shock I wake ...

Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...

Book Reviews by subject: Britain & Literature and Literary Criticism & 21st Century September 2018 Issue John Sutherland Brexit Lit March 2017 Issue D J Taylor ‘He Wrote This Specially For Me’ LR ...

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 ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

Death is the one promise life makes to us that it always keeps. From Homer, whose warriors at Troy are engulfed in the darkness of death, to Larkin glumly ‘going to the inevitable’, writers have shown ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

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 ...

It is a brave, some might say foolish writer who embarks on a history of the English Civil War these days. The grand historical narratives of the war that raged from 1642 to 1649, written by the likes ...

In this detailed and tautly written account, Guy Walters daringly takes a wrecker’s ball to that treasured national icon, the Great Escape. It is a heroic historical endeavour because the myth of the ...