I did a big lecture (big for me, anyway) at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. It was in a way Daniel in the lions' den, for ...

Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And ...

431pp. Chatto and Windus. £18.99.

The fourteenth century was a time of ecological disasters: plagues, storms, floods, earthquakes, droughts and famines. It was also, as Shannon Gayk notes, a time of “theological and literary ...

“Our romantic affair with the automobile has cooled”, writes Witold Rybczynski in this brisk, informative history of automotive design. What was once passionate – an infatuation that also seemed an ...

In The Five (2019), Hallie Rubenhold examined the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper, women until then remembered only because of the man who murdered them. In her latest book, she turns her ...

She’s “a fractal of our country, her biography a variation on its history, a version of the same story”, says Nour of Mouna, his shape-shifting mother, and of his birth country, Egypt. Nour is the ...

A man wearing a dark rollneck sweater and a long coat stands in front of a two-tone door, his brow furrowed and his beard ...

The results of the Oscar Wilde Society’s Wilde Wit competition are in. This much we gather from the new issue of Intentions, ...