Until recently, few readers would have been familiar with the painter, cultural ambassador and memoirist Józef Czapski. Born in 1896 into a noble Polish family, Czapski was sucked early in his life ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

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. ...

Visiting a new supermarket is a disorienting experience. On the surface, it’s all familiar: the sliding doors, the black rubber conveyor belts, the flecked linoleum. But then you can’t find the ...

Can thought be free in the 21st century? Recent developments suggest not. The penetration of the internet into every aspect of our lives has been accompanied by data harvesting on an extraordinary ...

Yesterday I drove ten minutes from my apartment to a place that delights me: Sormiou, in southernmost Marseille. Not to the famously idyllic calanque (or cove) of that name, but to the hulking Leclerc ...

What is to be done with hope? Ali Smith is a great artist of possibility. Think of the role chance plays in her work, from The Accidental to How to be Both’s thrillingly shuffled structure that meant ...

Family histories tend to follow an established format. The story of the author’s ancestors gets interwoven with that of the author’s own journey as they explore the past, discovering something about ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

‘And so it was that, on the evening of August 4, 1982,’ writes Mark O’Connell halfway through this gripping portrait of double killer Malcolm Macarthur, ‘the Irish government’s most senior legal ...

Any novel that mentions the Baldock bypass on the first page is going to appeal to a certain type of reader, one who knows the A roads of Britain and the difference between a Ford Zephyr and an Austin ...