On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

There has been a lot of Gainsborough about recently, notably the three exhibitions that ran concurrently in Bath, in Sudbury and at the National Portrait Gallery. If these have been the tip, Hugh ...

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

In 1859, the 25-year-old Edgar Degas, newly returned from Italy and settled in his first studio in Paris, chose to refine his drawing skills by copying Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1731), A Rake’s ...

‘Florella Burney Born June the 19: 1,758: in the Parish off St Anna SoHo. Not Baptiz’d, pray Let porticulare care be take’en off this child, As it will be call’d for Again.’ The love felt by desperate ...

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 ...

The paradox at the centre of High Fidelity is that while pop songs almost always involve love, passion and raw feeling, the kind of men who are most intensely addicted to pop music tend to be a bunch ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

In Days without End, the fourth in a loose series of novels chronicling the McNulty dynasty, Sebastian Barry travels back in time and across the Atlantic to a troubled 19th-century America. The ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

Simon Callow’s magniloquent biographical endeavour has taken a quarter of a century to compose and is still not complete. A final, fourth volume, dealing with the last two decades of Orson Welles’s ...