Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

Like the Thatcherite Tories he supported in his later years, Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, has now undergone two decades of detoxification. The contamination was quick and calamitous. Anthony ...

‘Catastrophic damage will occur’: so reads the impact assessment attached to the fifth and highest category on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, the metric used to classify the intensity of ...

On a hot June afternoon, a golden cloud of pollen comes wheeling across a Sussex meadow. It is too late in the year for alder or hazel, though it might be nettle or dock: it is hard to distinguish at ...

He had grown up in a house where nothing was said about what really mattered – where history filled the silence and annals of the parish supplanted personal lives. He grew used to secrets; he absorbed ...

In the Kremlin during the Second World War, Stalin’s circle had nicknames for Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt was ‘Captain’, while Churchill was ‘Wild Boar’. These were shrewd choices. For the ...

‘Quien es?’ The last words of William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, have obsessed many people. ‘Who is it?’ is a simple enough question to ask in a darkened room where you think a friend is sleeping, ...

SALLEY VICKERS IS an audacious writer. who dares to tread where few in this apostate age would wish to venture. At a time when the Church of England is struggling to persuade its dwindling ...

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 ...

HOW MANY LIVES of Marilyn Monroe do we actually need? On my shelves alone there are six major biographies, not counting books entirely devoted to the rumours surrounding her death; and now, opening on ...