It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

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 ...

Clients who visited the Mayfair studio of society photographer Hugh Cecil in the 1930s found themselves in a curiously exotic room. The walls were silver and the ceiling was black. Where the fireplace ...

Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, ...

Max Adams tells his readers very early on that ‘the real Dark Age in British history can be found in Book I of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History’. It is this lacuna, the period between 580 and 710, that ...

What manner of man was Doménikos Theotokópoulos, born in Crete in 1541, the dramatic, difficult and not quite loveable painter we know as El Greco? First, he was a great voyager, both geographically ...

This bestselling winner of last year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is largely set in suburban Melbourne during John Howard’s recent premiership. Dozens of characters are introduced in the first ...

Women are afraid of men. Not all of them, all of the time, but they know that men are capable of mixing sex and violence. Men sometimes do what women seldom, if ever do – commit rape. ‘After she was ...

The name John Pendlebury will be familiar to admirers of Dilys Powell’s marvellous account of the Villa Ariadne at Knossos, where for a while he was curator in succession to Sir Arthur Evans. But the ...

On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...

Everything we thought we knew about Göring is true, and more besides. He had a huge toy train set – with dive-bombing planes. He wore gaudy uniforms and medals – and togas, jewelled sandals, red boots ...

STRICTLY SPEAKING, JOHN Winthrop (1588-1649) was not one of the Pilgrim Fathers of New England. He did not sail on the Mayjlower in 1620. But ten years later he led, as elected Governor, a fleet of ...