It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...

It’s hardly a likely setting for an epiphany, a party full of the rich, the richer and the richest, all ghastly, in a marquee shrouded in ‘wastes of grey velvet’. Not exactly where you’d expect a ...

Europe is a culture with an ancient wound, a fault line which has divided it since the sixteenth-century Reformation. The division between Catholic and Protestant Europe still runs deep even where ...

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...

Lustrum, the second volume of Robert Harris's trilogy following the life, career and political travails of Cicero, is a splendidly researched historical blockbuster of real human depth and political ...

Ian Kershaw enters a crowded field with To Hell and Back, the first instalment of a two-volume history of Europe’s horrendous 20th century. Anyone interested in the period already has a formidable ...

‘Characters migrate.’ New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip takes this aphorism from Umberto Eco as its epigraph and it has multiple resonances in his novel. The thirteen-year-old narrator Matilda’s ...

Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism. @PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right. Peter ...