When I was military attaché in Rome, an Alpini general once asked me who were the ten greatest British generals. I replied that there would not be much argument about the top five but that opinion ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

Eco's thoughts on his astonishingly successful novel were originally published in an Italian journal in 1983, and subsequently reprinted as a free supplement to the Italian paperback edition of the ...

There can’t be many people who care for literature, for all round excellence, who wouldn’t be moved by the fact that Wole Soyinka has, at last, been awarded the Nobel prize. In my opinion he entered ...

Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology.

According to An Economic History of the English Garden, between 1820 and the present day, 15,652 gardening books have been published in the UK alone. That’s not the most astonishing number in this ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

Between October 2018 and April 2019, the Guggenheim in New York gave over its entire Frank Lloyd Wright-designed interior to the abstract paintings of the Swedish artist and medium Hilma af Klint, who ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...