It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

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 ...

Clients who visited the Mayfair studio of society photographer Hugh Cecil in the 1930s found themselves in a curiously exotic room. The walls were silver and the ceiling was black. Where the fireplace ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

Women are afraid of men. Not all of them, all of the time, but they know that men are capable of mixing sex and violence. Men sometimes do what women seldom, if ever do – commit rape. ‘After she was ...

This bestselling winner of last year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is largely set in suburban Melbourne during John Howard’s recent premiership. Dozens of characters are introduced in the first ...

LAST YEAR THE American historian Arthur Herman published a book on the Scottish Enlightenment with the subtitle 'The Scots' Invention of the Modern World'. James Buchan's subtitle is 'How Eknburgh ...

Even as the ink was drying on the Versailles Treaty in 1919, foreigners began to return to the Germany they had so loved: the country of Goethe and Schiller, of picturesque villages and romantic ...

Cuthbert Collingwood was in need of a biographer, not only because he was Nelson's best friend and, after Trafalgar, his successor, but because he then became historically significant in his own right ...

Taichi Yamada’s In Search of a Distant Voice was published in Japanese in 1989, completing a trilogy of novels which includes the ghostly Strangers, published to acclaim in English last year. His ...

Keeping track of the many clichés sprinkled throughout Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, I found myself assembling a sort of Reader’s Digest-style condensed version of the whole: ‘impressionable youth’, ...

Lustrum, the second volume of Robert Harris's trilogy following the life, career and political travails of Cicero, is a splendidly researched historical blockbuster of real human depth and political ...