To what extent does an author control the lives of his characters? This is the question at the heart of J M Coetzee’s new novel. But alongside it lies another, almost as intriguing: why is the Nobel ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

All but a few crumbs of the available archive materials have been studied, every political and psychological theory has been applied, filters of every colour – whitewash, deepest red, pitch black – ...

‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

The English author who perhaps most closely resembled Stefan Zweig was his near-contemporary Somerset Maugham. Maugham lived longer, and wrote more full-length novels and fewer biographical and ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

Simon Mawer’s new novel, about a female secret agent, is billed as a good old-fashioned adventure story, albeit one which is subtly subverted by the presence of a female heroine in a masculine world.

In the summer of 1897, two aspiring Greek poets, who were also brothers, ended their brief tour of Europe by spending three days in Paris. For the younger brother, Constantine Cavafy, those three days ...

THE SCOPE OF contemporary US dominance is unparalleled in human history. America has 752 military facilities in 130 countries, some of them until recently part of the Soviet empire. What the American ...

In March 1942, while working in wartime London as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming proposed the creation of a tiny but dedicated front-line unit of ...