There may be hope for civilisation after all if a dictionary can rise – as this one has done – to the commanding heights of the non-fiction best sellers’ list. The popularity of Collins Dictionary of ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

I have been thinking a good deal recently about the night side of the arts of Regency England. Choosing a selection of reverse-lit, partly transparent Regency prints for a small exhibition has led me ...

Between 1918 and 1922, Oswald Spengler published the two volumes of his The Decline of the West. The title gnawed at the minds of the intelligentsia and sent them searching for evidence of the ...

Diarmaid Ferriter is a historian in a hurry. Since his appointment as professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2008, at the age of thirty-six, he has astonished ...

The house across the street from mine – an ordinary two-storey Victorian terrace owned by an absent landlord – has a buddleia growing from a crack in its parapet. It’s a curiously ambiguous sight.

This morning I woke up laughing from a dream. It was about two young men and their podcast. The gist of it was that they reviewed things. Not books but ephemera, offering waspish assessments of ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

For the modernist designer Enid Marx, folk art, or what she called ‘popular art’, was ‘hard to define though easy enough to recognise when seen’. Marx and her partner, the historian Margaret Lambert, ...

When he returned to France from England in 1728, Voltaire joined a consortium to buy the French government’s lottery, which made him serious money. He used some of it to restore a chateau belonging to ...