Julian Bell's Mirror of the World naturally invites comparison with E H Gombrich's The Story of Art, now in its sixteenth edition and reprinted every year but one since it was first published by ...

Susan Bridgen is a rare creature among Tudor historians writing for a general audience. Her style is spare, her manner cool and impersonal. Not for her the luxuriant prose, the passionate engagement ...

Unlike Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping did not pretend to be a poet, a philosopher or a calligrapher. The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, in a mere three volumes, offer few hints about the person himself.

For a brief but intense period after the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë was ‘the rage’ in the world of Victorian letters. Only such a phrase can describe the fascination she had for ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. By the end of Josephine Baker’s life, she had become the ...

Gate of Lilacs is, in Clive James’s words, a ‘quinzaine of rhapsodies’: a poem of fifteen parts in blank verse that is also a critical essay on Proust. ‘His book,’ says James, ‘big for a book, is ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

Dainty enough to perch at the top of a Christmas stocking, Adrian Tinniswood’s celebration of the Victorian rise and mid-20th-century slow collapse of the country house party is a richly anecdotal ...

This is the autobiography of the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest, and return to tell the tale. His friend and comrade Tenzing Norgay was second on the rope to the summit: whether George ...

Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

Edmund de Waal made his first pot when he was five years old and dipped it in white glaze. He made his first white porcelain bowl at seventeen and is still at it. Porcelain has been a white gold, ...

First, a confession. Ali Smith has been a heroine of mine since she eschewed professional theatre companies and chose instead a bunch of schoolchildren to adapt her novel Hotel World for the stage.