Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

In March 1942 the fate of the Allies hung in the balance. Despite Pearl Harbor, the Americans had yet to intervene decisively in the Second World War and, while events in Europe showed signs of ...

Retired politicians have cornered the market in biographies of great leaders. These books annoy historians because they pinch their research and sell more copies. They tend to be uncritically admiring ...

Recently I interviewed Tristan Garcia, one of France’s most vaunted young novelists, and mentioned that I’d been teaching Michel Tournier’s The Erl-King. His eyes took on sudden light and we spent the ...

Frances Villiers, Lady Purbeck, was exactly the kind of woman who worried Charles I. Despite her credentials – aristocratic birth, inherited wealth, an excellent marriage to one of his favoured ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...

Seán Williams: Don’t Call It Wild SwimmingSwitzerland’s landscape is as much a place of freshwater troughs as it is of picture-postcard Alpine peaks, so much so that splashing about in lakes and ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

He had grown up in a house where nothing was said about what really mattered – where history filled the silence and annals of the parish supplanted personal lives. He grew used to secrets; he absorbed ...

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, has not been idle since leaving government. Talking to Terrorists is his third book in six years, following on the heels of a volume on Machiavelli ...