The title and introduction of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s book led me to expect something like Bertrand Russell’s 1948 tract Human Knowledge, a quasi-Kantian investigation of how we have come to know ...

Despite everything, I am six weeks married. The ‘everything’ is not the man. It’s marriage – an institution that I long hesitated to enter. For one thing, I didn’t understand what the state, the ...

‘Your immortal soul!’ my father used to shout, brandishing his fist. His lament was also a threat – to me, his teenage daughter, that I stood to lose my soul if I lost my Catholic faith. Nowadays, of ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

When I was military attaché in Rome, an Alpini general once asked me who were the ten greatest British generals. I replied that there would not be much argument about the top five but that opinion ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

‘What London needs is a good shaking up,’ remarked the maverick American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge upon arriving in England with his dream of opening the capital’s grandest department store. The ...

One’s initial response is, why bother? Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of Robert Graves covers the same period as Good-bye to All That. It is no criticism to say that she writes less well than ...

What makes reading Margaret Atwood such fun is her gift for enjoying herself so thoroughly as she writes. She makes you share her zest for words, people, jokes, sharp-edged description and endless ...

Ali Allawi’s credentials for writing The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace are unimpeachable. Born an Iraqi Shi’a, Allawi spent most of his life in exile from his native country, ...

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 ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...