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 ...

Four times elected governor of New York state from 1958 to 1970, Nelson Rockefeller spent much of each term seeking the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, to which be belonged, but which ...

On September 10, after watching the ABC News debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I switched to X to judge the response. Not long ago I would have rolled my eyes at a post by the ...

Introducing his excellent anthology of Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets (1967), Auden properly addressed a problem of definition: what is a “minor poet”? Or, to ask the same question the other way round ...

Doors – as means of escape or entrapment, of release or privacy – proliferate in Roddy Doyle’s new novel. At the beginning of The Women Behind the Door, in which three older women are en route to ...

“The whorehouse of thought” is how Claude Vignon, a journalist in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), describes newspapers. Vignon shares his contempt for the industry which employs him with the ...