Returning to England from Belfast, where I taught for a time, I frequently footstepped the Quantock Hills in Somerset, from Wills Neck to West Quantoxhead, following the stream in Holford Combe before ...

Clients who visited the Mayfair studio of society photographer Hugh Cecil in the 1930s found themselves in a curiously exotic room. The walls were silver and the ceiling was black. Where the fireplace ...

Since, so far as I can tell, all 5 million of the Literary Review’s readers – with the sole exception of myself – are writing/have written at least one book, they will know what I mean by ‘the myths ...

One of the more curious effluents of our current ecological crisis is the novel of environmental degradation, and specifically of deforestation. Such works – 2016’s Barkskins, by the Pulitzer Prize ...

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 ...

Ian Kershaw enters a crowded field with To Hell and Back, the first instalment of a two-volume history of Europe’s horrendous 20th century. Anyone interested in the period already has a formidable ...

Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology.

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

Could we be about to witness a Matthew Arnold revival after years of disparagement of his poetry by T S Eliot and those who came after him? The multiplicity of popular editions indicates that the ...

In February of this year, speculation about the identity of the body found beneath a Leicester car park – soon confirmed to be Richard III – was at its height. At the time, Chris Skidmore published an ...

It is one of the outstanding mysteries of the Algerian War of Independence, fought and lost by the French against Algerian Nationalists between 1954 and 1962, that the conflict produced no literature ...

In September 1943 Churchill informed the House of Commons that he believed that the Germans combined ‘in the most deadly manner’ the attributes of warrior and slave. If a ‘more frightful’ conflict was ...