Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the loose group that came later to be labelled 'The Georgians' all knew each other: poets, painters, editors, critics (there seemed enviably little ...

That title is misleading, as is the identical declaration of trade on the poet's tombstone. Larkin wrote, and wrote well, but he did not write for a living. Those of his generation (to my shock I wake ...

Edward W Said, a scholar born in Palestine and educated in Egypt, is presently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on contemporary ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...

Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that ...

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

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 ...

At a dinner party recently, the conversation turned to personal heroes. I chose Primo Levi – the Italian Jewish chemist turned writer who survived Auschwitz to immortalise it in his books, If This Is ...

Sir Steven Runciman’s lapidary account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, now forty years old, was a lamentation for the civilisation and the people he loved: ‘In this story,’ he wrote, ...

John Gray is an acknowledged master of the calculated overstatement. He likes to make us think. And he does it by throwing the equivalent of intellectual hand grenades. Consider the following claim – ...

If Anna Letitia Barbauld’s was a voice of the Enlightenment, it hasn’t, until now, carried very far. Known in her own time as a poet and controversial essayist, her fame in the fifty years after her ...