Sometime in the mid-1970s, I went to a party in Tina Brown’s rooms in Bloomsbury, and was introduced to Alexander Chancellor. I was then working for the New Statesman, correctly recollected in this ...

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

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 ...

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

If novels are going to be as rich in reference as Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, I do think the publishers should be encouraged to add optional reading lists at the end. Fludd is a funny, exquisitely written ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

Malcolm Budd is a lecturer in Philosophy at University College, London. He knows a good deal about music, but whether as a listener, performer or composer we have no means, other than the direct ...

I once asked a former Oxford classics don which verse translation of Homer he thought was best. He shrugged before saying, ‘Read Homer in Greek, or else in prose.’ On the face of it, this looks like a ...

Geoffrey Crowther, who edited The Economist from 1938 to 1956, summed up its house style in three words: ‘simplify, then exaggerate’. That approach has served the magazine brilliantly. Other ...

Many of Dirk Bogarde's best performances on screen involved the use of significant pauses: the enigmatic look on his face as he regards the sleeping James Fox in the first scene of Joseph Losey's The ...

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 ...

Sebastian Faulks’s fourteenth novel shares many of the preoccupations of the previous thirteen. As in his early trilogy (Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray) and in much of his most ...