Although his literary works are by no means uniformly successful, Peter Ackroyd may safely be described as an author possessed of genius, and had he died before attaining middle age (like Bruce ...

When we left him at the end of David Moody’s first volume, published in 2007, Ezra Pound had gone from London to Paris, declaring with a flounce that there was ‘no longer any intellectual life in ...

Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of ...

What a difference a decade makes. In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

I’m not sure what stands out for you when you think of the late 1990s – DeLillo’s Underworld? The dot-com bubble? Titanic? – but for me it’s two things: working (somewhat reluctantly) in New Age ...

Patrick McGuinness has written an unusual, and unusually interesting, first novel. Its title refers to the last hundred days of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s malign regime in Romania – the sole country in the ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

For a brief but intense period after the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë was ‘the rage’ in the world of Victorian letters. Only such a phrase can describe the fascination she had for ...

According to a little note printed at the back of The Widow and the Parrot, Quentin Bell and his brother commissioned the piece from their Aunt Virginia for publication in the family newspaper the two ...