It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

The story that apparently inspired Barclay Price to write this book is of a Chinese man called William Macao who arrived in Britain in or around 1775 as a servant. Thanks to benign employers, he was ...

Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) is a wonderful, horrible film. It follows the adventures of Johnny, a Mancunian Raskolnikov, introduced to us in the first scene committing a vicious rape. Repellent yet ...

John Gray, a political philosopher who spent much of his academic career attacking the Enlightenment, has in recent years turned his gaze on his entire species, whom he has renamed Homo rapiens. Since ...

Norma Clarke: Hutch Ado About Nothing - The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England by Karen Harvey ...

‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

A telling French phrase to describe a girl who has lost her virginity is elle a vu le loup (‘she has seen the wolf’). This is just one of the many delectable facts waiting to be discovered in Shahidha ...

Apart from his talents as biographer and novelist, A N Wilson is the best literary interpreter now writing. I may have got the knack of generalisation from his own book: The Diary of a Nobody he calls ...

Retired politicians have cornered the market in biographies of great leaders. These books annoy historians because they pinch their research and sell more copies. They tend to be uncritically admiring ...

The story of the Younghusband Mission, or invasion of Tibet, has been told many times. Within a year of reaching Lhasa five of its participants wrote what we would now call instant books. They ...

In March 1942 the fate of the Allies hung in the balance. Despite Pearl Harbor, the Americans had yet to intervene decisively in the Second World War and, while events in Europe showed signs of ...

Ammonites and Leaping Fish is a title as engaging as I suspect the author, Penelope Lively, to be. Born in Cairo in 1933, she was a typical upper-class English child of those times. Her father was a ...