With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Spinoza, according to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, is ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’. As a natural consequence of his ethical supremacy, Russell adds, ...

Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000) is famed for his twenty ‘tales’ – as he called them – about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, one of the great pairs of ...

‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first ...

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 ...

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 ...

In Hunting Evil Guy Walters dares, as the Chinese say, ‘to touch the tiger's bottom’. He mounts a full-scale attack on the reputation of Simon Wiesenthal, the world's most famous Nazi hunter. The book ...

In 1937–8, at the height of the Great Terror, Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, visited Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin no fewer than 278 times for private meetings lasting a total of 834 hours. So far ...

Augustus the Strong’s name has long been a byword for dissipation. Yet he was also a great patron of the arts, creating in Dresden perhaps the finest Baroque city in Europe. Ritchie Robertson examines ...

Augustus the Strong’s name has long been a byword for dissipation. Yet he was also a great patron of the arts, creating in Dresden perhaps the finest Baroque city in Europe. Ritchie Robertson examines ...

Yesterday I drove ten minutes from my apartment to a place that delights me: Sormiou, in southernmost Marseille. Not to the famously idyllic calanque (or cove) of that name, but to the hulking Leclerc ...

When Pietro Russell, the anti-hero of A Fool’s Alphabet, thinks of an afterlife, he imagines ‘a hell that is entirely composed of hotel bathrooms’. There will be the bars of soap, too tightly packed ...