Promising comfort is what a good stew should offer – but boeuf en daube, from Provence, with its cragged hunks of meat ...

Why is it, when Islamism has damaged the image of Islam so comprehensively, that the faith seems to retain a huge popularity?

England, tutted fifteenth-century Frenchmen, is where they kill their kings. Though the comment’s smug self-satisfaction ...

James Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd turned bestselling author, made his name writing about the rhythms and realities of ...

Ahead of next year’s centenary of The Great Gatsby, the inevitable revisiting of Fitzgerald gets under way. Two new ...

The whorehouse of thought” is how Claude Vignon, a journalist in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), describes newspapers.

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was “a man who lived a woman’s life”. This is how Lucy Hughes-Hallett introduces her richly multilayered, Life of the royal favourite who was only thirty-five ...

After an exchange with Brian Vickers relating to disputed questions of dramatic collaboration I had researched with Laurie ...

add up to. Some days I almost believe the ocean is real, that there really is all that fishing to be done. And some days the sun just hits the buildings all wrong. As usual the sky is a total mess and ...

Matthew Kadane disarmingly describes his new book as an “intellectual history of nobodies”. Its protagonist is the splendidly named Pentecost Barker, born in Plymouth in 1690, the son of devoutly ...