It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

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 ...

Fiona MacCarthy met Walter Gropius (1883–1969) through Jack Pritchard, the British entrepreneur who built Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, an experiment in modernist living where Gropius took up ...

Sheer bluff, calling a book like this The Critical Heritage. The Critical Detritus would be nearer the mark. Any good writer needs to be read in a new way; it might be argued that the creaks and ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

I was telling my friend Moon Biglow the other day that I was going to Hampstead to see some literary people. ‘Oh, littery people,’ said Moon – because that’s how he talks. ‘Oh, Hampstead!’ said Moon. ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

Dani is a successful singer who is taking his father’s body from Madrid to be buried in the village where he was brought up. For the forty-year-old, it’s a trip to a Spain he doesn’t know. It’s ...

Yu Hua, an author new to me, has written a great deal, sells well in China, and has a sizeable international reputation. This is his first non-fiction work translated – and very nimbly, too, by Allan ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

Hugo Williams has been writing elegantly crafted and accessible poetry for over fifty years. His tone of voice today is not appreciably different from the one that first asserted itself in the 1960s.

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...