Philip Sassoon was (among other things) an exotic, an aesthete, a plutocrat, a politician, a patron of the arts, a society host and an arbiter of taste. Harold Nicolson once wrote that he was ‘the ...

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...

THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of Stalin's death last year should have brought about not just worldwide rejoicing, but a torrent of new biographies. The world was, however, distracted by the fall of a ...

The fifties was the great decade of radio soap-opera. I myself am always very mindful of this aspect of the period since my own godmother devised and was the principal coordinating scriptwriter of Mrs ...

A few months ago, a clutch of unremarkable-looking pamphlets flopped onto my desk at Bernard Quaritch Ltd, an antiquarian bookshop in London. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, these unassuming ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

A FEW YEARS ago, I mentioned to a London Jewish friend that I was writing an article about the Irish diaspora. ‘Diaspora?’ he shouted. ‘We’re the ones with the diaspora. Is there nothing the bloody ...

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