It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...

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 ...

Every 9 November during the Third Reich, Hitler and his minions performed a solemn memorial rite for comrades killed during the struggle for power. The day that properly commemorated the dead of the ...

If Brazil is not for beginners, as the composer Tom Jobim once said, Rio de Janeiro often feels as if requires postdoctoral-level skills to penetrate. Like in mid-century Los Angeles, Rio’s seemingly ...

It is a quarter of a century since Helena Kennedy’s book Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice was published. A great deal has changed in that time, a circumstance reflected in the less equivocal ...

‘To capture the fish is not all of the fishing,’ insisted that dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey; and, whilst that may be true enough, I feel my spirits sink whenever I see an angling book promoted ...

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 ...

As a family, we while away long car journeys with the Young Bond series. However, despite many happy hours listening to the dashing Etonian face up to baby Blofelds, I had never thought to place our ...

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...