North London is a more modish breeding ground for novelists than Notting Hill ever was – spawning among others Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Will Self. Nicola Barker, who sets Small Holdings here on ...

In 1848, the wave of political uprisings taking place across Europe reached the Frankfurt street where the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was living, comfortably, off money from his father’s shipping ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

This is a splendid and thoroughly absorbing book, one to read quickly at an enthusiastic gallop, and then to return to reading with care, relishing the observations and speculations which Ackroyd ...

Herbert Hart was a philosopher who rescued one of the most important branches of his discipline from neglect and stagnation - the philosophy of law. Philosophy of law is the enquiry into the nature ...

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 ...

John Banville: The Master by the ArnoIt shames me to admit that I came somewhat late to Henry James. In my adolescence I read The Turn of the Screw and, being young, largely missed the sly and ...

‘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 ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

‘The Infant Modernists’ is one of the great unwritten works of critical biography. Shiningly specific childhood experience, the oeuvres of Woolf, Joyce and T S Eliot all insinuate, lies at the heart ...

Marc Morris is an up-and-coming historian, with a biography of Edward I and an influential volume on castles already under his belt. Here he attempts an ambitious overview of the Norman conquest from ...

The image of the Viking warrior has long been a source of (sometimes guilty) fascination. Victorian intellectuals were eager to see in the Vikings a specifically northern inspiration for British ...