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 ...

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

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 ...

Neville Chamberlain was nothing if not a diligent correspondent. Every week he wrote to his sisters Ida and Hilda letters that were in effect a diary of everything he was doing politically. They have ...

Not too likely judging by my current rate of promotion, but if I were God and mulling over a bit of fire and brimstone for the House of Commons, Richard Body’s membership might stay My hand. We get ...

The Western Isles are often shrunk from the scale afforded the mainland of Britain so as to fit onto a page of an atlas. Love of Country should serve to restore spaciousness, air and attention to this ...

Memories, memories, ah, fond memories! Flicking rapidly through the above-mentioned tome for the purposes of this review, I could not help but recall those golden days in the early Seventies – or was ...

Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism. @PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right. Peter ...

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2011, A L Kennedy objected to ‘Hollywood endings’ and ‘people wanting the unobtainable’. She’s certainly not a writer we associate with happily-ever-after: ...