‘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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

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

In a recent Observer article, Martin Amis reported from a location shoot for the film RoboCop 2, a science-fiction fantasy about a policeman of the future, part human and part machine. It was a ...

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 ...

Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson: Heads Will Roll - The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution by David Andress ...

As A CHILD Robert Macfarlane chanced upon a copy of The Fight for Everest, an account of the epic 1924 expedition on which George Mallory and Sandy Irvine vanished into the mists on the summit ridge.

The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, Volume IV: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940 By Robert Self (ed) Ashgate 588pp £82.50 ...

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...