Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Yu Hua, an author new to me, has written a great deal, sells well in China, and has a sizeable international reputation. This is his first non-fiction work translated – and very nimbly, too, by Allan ...

War of Words - What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea by Fara Dabhoiwala ...

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art by Rhodri Lewis; Shakespeare is Hard, but So is Life by Fintan O’Toole ...

Lispector had prior journalistic experience – in her twenties she’d worked for the national wire service – but her previous columns were ‘women’s pages’ written under a variety of pseudonyms. In one ...

Fuchsia Dunlop is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Chinese cuisine. She made her name with Sichuan Cookery in 2001, following that book up with a slew of others, all on different aspects of ...

You would think that there were dozens of histories of British art out there, along the lines of an art history course I came across titled ‘Caveman to Picasso’. Oddly, there are not, and those that ...

The desires of diarists, to paraphrase Lytton Strachey, are wonderfully various. They can be motivated by Schadenfreude, reportage, self-defence or simple record-keeping. Most diaries are destined ...

In 1938, Joseph Roth sat across the street watching the demolition of the Paris hotel he called home. He drank, he smoked and he wrote a short, sharp, lyrical piece describing how, ‘because the hotel ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

This is a timely book. It reminds us of a particularly shameful moment in our modern history, when fascism, despite having just been defeated in a war in which millions lost their lives, once more ...

Price rises can be a sign of political end times. I remember being in the USSR (as it still was, just) in the summer of 1991 and becoming aware that a fistful of soiled rouble notes would buy very ...