Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: ...

The last time I cried at the cinema was when Louis Armstrong welled up on the soundtrack of Good Morning, Vietnam, singing ‘What A Wonderful World’ in that black croon-drawl of his as scores of raw ...

AFTER ANITA BROOKNER'S brief experiment with an elderly man as the main character in last year's novel, The Next Big Thing, her trademark women are back at the centre here - and back with a vengeance.

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century chronicler of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, memorably described the Gothic ruler Alaric as ‘a victorious leader, who united the daring spirit of a barbarian ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

I have been thinking a good deal recently about the night side of the arts of Regency England. Choosing a selection of reverse-lit, partly transparent Regency prints for a small exhibition has led me ...

Between 1918 and 1922, Oswald Spengler published the two volumes of his The Decline of the West. The title gnawed at the minds of the intelligentsia and sent them searching for evidence of the ...

Diarmaid Ferriter is a historian in a hurry. Since his appointment as professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2008, at the age of thirty-six, he has astonished ...

The house across the street from mine – an ordinary two-storey Victorian terrace owned by an absent landlord – has a buddleia growing from a crack in its parapet. It’s a curiously ambiguous sight.