In August 1964 Joe McPhillips and I walked into the Parade Bar in Tangier to find Bill Burroughs. Standing beside him was a tall man sipping his favourite cocktail – a bourbon mist with a twist. He ...

It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

Courage is not a virtue much valued today. Although the word itself is widely bandied about (as in, ‘Courage of Young Mum in Cancer Battle’), it is usually in connection with situations not of the ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

Kit de Waal’s second novel, The Trick to Time, begins with Mona, a sixty-year-old Irish immigrant, standing by her window in the middle of the night. She notices a man in the building across from her ...

THE ASSAULT ON China’s natural environment has been going on for dennia. Even the most casual traveller notices how few trees, animals and birds remain; and yet a glance at Chinese poems or paintings ...

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 ...

To the extent that ‘Calvinism’ means anything at all to the modern mind, it evokes images of Puritan witch-hunts in New England, or, perhaps, memories of stifling restrictions on leisure in a formerly ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...

Rooting around in the basement of a Camden library a couple of decades ago I came across a set of shelves buckling under the weight of the handsome Caxton edition of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

There’s a moment to savour in the 1930 Marx Brothers comedy Animal Crackers when Groucho flings woo at two wealthy women while wishing he could tell us what he really thinks of them. ‘Pardon me while ...