A hundred years ago to be one of a million Englishwomen was to be doomed. Even intelligent and educated girls could not get a post as a governess – there were too many. Hundreds of thousands resorted ...

THE INDIAN CIVIL SERVICE: deep in the English psyche is an obsession with India, and this vast organisation was once an inseparable part of it. The reason was partly logistical. India was so far and ...

Impostor syndrome was first described in 1978 by the psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. It is now such a common phenomenon that organisations all across the world run seminars and ...

Returning to England from Belfast, where I taught for a time, I frequently footstepped the Quantock Hills in Somerset, from Wills Neck to West Quantoxhead, following the stream in Holford Combe before ...

The old-style publisher’s memoir, which reached its high-water mark between about 1920 and 1950, was a relatively staid affair. The publisher who wrote it – say, Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, author ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

If the Bloomsberries lived in squares and loved in triangles, the Olivier sisters lived in tents and loved in Venn diagrams. Take Noel Olivier, the youngest of the four and the star of Sarah Watling’s ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

It seems amazing that this is the first major biography for almost thirty years of the man who gave definitive expression to the English experience of the First World War. It is, in fact, only the ...

I have often heard it said that Lt-Gen Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, provided the model for Evelyn Waugh’s immortal Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Carton de Wiart won his Cross, and was ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

The story of Saladin has been told many times. One of the most influential portraits of the 12th-century Ayyubid sultan appeared in a work of fiction, Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825). In that ...