‘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) ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

Alan Sheridan has written a biography of Gide. It is the story of Gide’s life and the history of the many books that Gide published. He writes therefore both as an historian and as a literary critic.

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 ...

Herbert Hart was a philosopher who rescued one of the most important branches of his discipline from neglect and stagnation - the philosophy of law. Philosophy of law is the enquiry into the nature ...

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 ...

‘The days are days of shaking’, declared the preacher Jeremiah Whittaker in an anxious sermon before the House of Commons in 1643; ‘days of trouble, rebuke and blasphemy’. And, he might have added, ...