What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

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 ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

No star has been rising more rapidly in the critical firmament over the past decade than Mikhail Bakhtin, communist, Russian Orthodox theologian, revolutionary philosopher of language, founding father ...

Constance Lloyd will for ever be remembered chiefly as Mrs Oscar Wilde, though she was an original and unusual person in her own right. As the subtitle of this new biography makes plain, Franny ...

‘My books are simply autobiographies,’ Mark Twain once confessed. True of most American writers, it seems especially true of a man who, as Ron Powers argues in this magisterial biography, ‘found a ...

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 ...

‘Impossible.’ Thus spake Martin Amis at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October: ‘Very few writers have got anywhere with sex.’ Nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award seem to have viewed this ...

In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

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 ...