In 1881, shortly before his death, Trelawny was visited by the eminent archivist Sir Sidney Colvin. Like others who had beaten a path to Trelawny’s door, Colvin had come to listen to a legendary ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

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 ...

Pedeir Ceinc y Mabinogi is a set of four loosely connected prose tales preserved in a couple of late medieval Welsh manuscripts, though they must have reached their present form by about 1200. The ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, ...

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

The war between Britain and the United States, from 1812 to 1814, is one of the half-forgotten events of history. It arouses little interest even in America, and none among the British, most of whom ...

Is there anything more to be written about Byron? Yes: plenty. Fiona MacCarthy has been given the run of the immense Murray archive and has come up with interesting discoveries. She is a pertinacious ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

Guernica is the world’s best-known work of art based on an act of war. It was painted in Paris eighty years ago by Pablo Picasso following an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War. On 26 April 1937, some ...