Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

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 ...

Arthur Miller seems an ideal subject for a biographer. Works such as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible have a resonance that extends well beyond America and the era in which he wrote them. As ...

Serial killers, convicted or alleged, undoubtedly exude a kind of corrupt majesty. Among them, for sheer originality and rather whiffy charisma, the modern emperor must be Jeffrey Dahmer. It was, of ...

It is a brave, some might say foolish writer who embarks on a history of the English Civil War these days. The grand historical narratives of the war that raged from 1642 to 1649, written by the likes ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...

Bobby Fischer was always outspoken: ‘They have killed chess with their boring methods of play, with their boring matches in their boring country,’ he said of the Soviets. It may have seemed that way ...