‘Like that black president, you’d think … you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do,’ says Me, the disingenuous black narrator of Paul Beatty’s latest, Booker-shortlisted novel ...

Of all the Old Masters, Leonardo and Caravaggio are undoubtedly the media darlings, subject to a ceaseless tide of speculative claim and counter-claim (the new loo paper dispensers in my local leisure ...

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 ...

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I went to a party in Tina Brown’s rooms in Bloomsbury, and was introduced to Alexander Chancellor. I was then working for the New Statesman, correctly recollected in this ...

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 ...

Susan Bridgen is a rare creature among Tudor historians writing for a general audience. Her style is spare, her manner cool and impersonal. Not for her the luxuriant prose, the passionate engagement ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

Some of us find it remarkably difficult simply to go for a walk. We need an excuse, a project, a literary precedent. We don’t want our wanderings, or our accounts of them, to be simply strolls in the ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Julian Bell's Mirror of the World naturally invites comparison with E H Gombrich's The Story of Art, now in its sixteenth edition and reprinted every year but one since it was first published by ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...