The most reticent and troubled member of the so-called New York School of Poets, James Schuyler (1923–91) gave his first ...

In Those Who Are About to Die, Harry Sidebottom recounts a story told by St Augustine of a pupil who detested the games but ...

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, ...

In an essay entitled ‘American Literature and Language’ (1953), T S Eliot wrote that, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ‘reveals himself to be one of those writers, of whom there are not a great many in ...

Historians of science have a guilty secret: we don’t particularly enjoy writing about those deemed singular geniuses. The public – or at least publishers – want stories of revolutionaries who stood ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

‘Carthage must be destroyed’ – the most famous thing ever said about Rome’s ancient rival. The words were uttered by the Roman historian and statesman Cato as he dumped a pile of juicy Carthaginian ...

Beauchamp Roding church stands alone among the rolling fields of north-west Essex; half a century ago, the local explanation for its isolation was that the village had been wiped out by the Black ...

Benjamin Wood’s new novel opens in Longferry, a town on the northwest coast, with an unforgettable image of a young working man, Thomas Flett, plying a well-nigh obsolete trade – that of ‘seascraping’ ...