Sir Steven Runciman’s lapidary account of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, now forty years old, was a lamentation for the civilisation and the people he loved: ‘In this story,’ he wrote, ...

Marguerite Duras’s bitterly gentle prose has a seductive and impressive immediacy. Her sardonic and incisive style resembles that of Katherine Mansfield, and they share the same quality of atmospheric ...

Harold Bloom’s lifelong obsession with literary influence can be traced to a precise date. It was on the fateful morning of 11 July 1967, he tells us, after a night of ‘metaphysical terror’ followed ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

Of all the Old Masters, Leonardo and Caravaggio are the main media darlings, subject to a ceaseless tide of speculative claim and counterclaim. But that grumpy old man-mountain Michelangelo (1475–1564 ...

Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...

Stoyo Petkanov, the central character of Julian Barnes’s new novella, is a satirical creation of genius. Three parts Todor Zhivkov, the ghastly former ruler of Bulgaria, to one part Alf Garnett, he is ...

In this short but insightful book, Peter Whittle pinpoints one of the most conspicuous but shallowly perceived phenomena of our times. The cult of celebrity is in itself hardly news. We live in a time ...