Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

Richard Nixon was a bad man but an effective conservative – a conservative not in the ideological sense (cutting taxes, throwing bums off welfare) but in the sense of a statesman who tries to navigate ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

Of all the dominant actors on the mid-19th-century scene, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the most charismatic and divisive. Admittedly he had nothing of that physique du rôle which a nation ...

Once you unstop your ears to its music, the siren song of the American road is hard to resist. I made my first coast-to-coast drive at the age of nineteen, setting out with a friend in my battered ...

In the Cold War struggle between the West and the Soviet Bloc, nothing was off limits. Not the space race. Not the Olympic Games. Not even cows. Reared on Cuba’s Isle of Pines, Ubre Blanca (White ...

‘It is a fact,’ Elizabeth Bowen wrote in her postscript to The Demon Lover, and Other Stories (1945), ‘that in Britain, and especially in London, in war-time many people had strange deep intense ...

For many, what would come to be known as Christianity was still a Jewish sect operating within the confines of the established Law (ie the teachings of the Torah). Yet Christianity was cosmopolitan ...

Six of the Best - The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World by Bojan Pancevski ...

That episode is pivotal in Liaquat Ahamed’s panorama of the origins of an era of deflation, stagnation and unrest – the ‘first Great Depression’ – that afflicted much of the world for the rest of the ...