‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

Our search for the hidden springs of Englishness begins in 1290 with the slaying of the last wolf in England by Sir Peter Corbet. As the story goes, this made the country safe enough to become a vast ...

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 ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

‘Trust the players,’ 89-year-old Bernard Haitink told a twenty-something conductor in Lucerne this spring, ‘they have so much more experience than you do.’ Haitink says relatively little during his ...

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...

Lord Byron, shortly before his brief, doomed marriage to her niece Annabella Milbanke, described Elizabeth Lamb, Lady Melbourne (known to the admiring young poet as Lady M), as ‘the best friend I ever ...

The war between Britain and the United States, from 1812 to 1814, is one of the half-forgotten events of history. It arouses little interest even in America, and none among the British, most of whom ...