Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: ...

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...

The old-style publisher’s memoir, which reached its high-water mark between about 1920 and 1950, was a relatively staid affair. The publisher who wrote it – say, Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, author ...

Anyone familiar with Jung Chang’s earlier work will know what to expect from her. She paints China’s intense and complex history in bold strokes. This new book offers up roughly a century’s worth of ...

From her second novel, What Are You Like? (2000), about twin girls separated at birth in Dublin, up to 2007’s Booker-winning The Gathering, in which historical sexual abuse within an Irish family ...

For a computer programmer, or indeed anyone at all, Ada Lovelace had the oddest start in life. She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and hence should have been the female incarnation of ...

The Venetian Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto never married. After decades of scrabbling for commissions in northern Italy, he died an oblate, reflecting mournfully in his will that he had earned ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: ...

Reading Taki’s High Life column in The Spectator is like being given the key to the door of the secret garden. Once inside you are confronted by all sorts of exotic flora and fauna; ‘Avocato’ Gianni ...

The life of actress and amateur philosopher Joanna Lumley is like those dramatic conversations you half-hear from the next table in a restaurant – considerably less fascinating, and slightly ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...