At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Eric Shanes’s remarkable book about the first half of J M W Turner’s career is the summation of thirty years of research into the painter’s work by a group of curators at the Tate Gallery, members of ...

I am not in favour of capital punishment, but if anyone should have been hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 it was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the SS general responsible for setting up Auschwitz in 1940, ...

Dividing lines cover the vast North American continent, writing meanings and demarcations onto its previously unplotted space. The most famous line of all was the Mason-Dixon, surveyed and drawn ...

The Imagist poet T E Hulme described Romanticism as ‘spilt religion’, and his quip continues to resonate today. Elevating them to a standing once accorded only to the Deity, the Romantic belief that ...

Sylvia Plath began keeping a journal when she was eleven and continued until her death at the age of thirty. This new edition publishes the journals that survive from the last twelve years of her life ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

It shames me to admit that I came somewhat late to Henry James. In my adolescence I read The Turn of the Screw and, being young, largely missed the sly and appalling ambiguities of this ‘trap for the ...

Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, ...

In 2012 we shall celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth. His reputation has held up well compared with his contemporaries – Thackeray, Balzac, Emerson, Turgenev and Carlyle, for ...

For Edward Thomas the literary life was addictive and an anathema. Many of us, I suspect, have discovered this in the same way; that is, by turning to his correspondence and to the autobiographies of ...