In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

In his recent Radio 4 series on heroism, Rory Stewart admitted that as a child he had ambitions. Some eight-year-old boys want to be train drivers, others fancy becoming postmen. Stewart wanted to be ...

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 ...

THIS SHORT BOOK attempts to diagnose the nature, the cause and the goal of anti-Western attitudes in the world today. Buruma and Margalit's primary target is the Islamist war on Western jahiliyya.

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

For those of us who lead lives of quiet desperation this book puts matters into perspective. The journalist Peter Zimonjic was on one of the three Tube trains – a bus was also blown up – bombed on 7 ...

Last year Finneas O’Connell, the brother and creative partner of Billie Eilish, released a poignant song called ‘The 90s’, which fixated on a decade ‘when the future was a testament/To something ...

Behind the Lawrence Legend: the title suggests debunking, iconoclasm, the examination of dirty laundry – another contribution, that is, to the lively tradition of Lawrence-bashing that began with ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

It is odd to read a novel one simultaneously admires and loathes. The admiration is for the book’s intelligence, lack of sentimentality and often extraordinary phrase-making: the loathing is for the ...