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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

‘For thou wert there’, says Coleridge, wonderingly, in the lines he addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him recite The Prelude – the ‘there’ in question being the Revolution in France. Wordsworth ...

‘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, ...

John Gray: Mind the Gap - The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

Adrian Tinniswood: Not a Straight Line in Sight - Baroque Between the Wars: Alternative Style in the Arts, 1918–1939 by Jane Stevenson ...

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, ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...