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 ...

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 ...

In the winter of 1822–3, Hegel gave a series of lectures at the University of Berlin. The subject was the philosophy of history, which for him meant the onward march of spirit, or reason – and for the ...

LAST YEAR THE American historian Arthur Herman published a book on the Scottish Enlightenment with the subtitle 'The Scots' Invention of the Modern World'. James Buchan's subtitle is 'How Eknburgh ...

Sense & Sensibility - Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun: The Entwined Lives of Two Great Eighteenth-Century Women Artists by ...

Keeping track of the many clichés sprinkled throughout Mohsin Hamid’s new novel, I found myself assembling a sort of Reader’s Digest-style condensed version of the whole: ‘impressionable youth’, ...

No other poet in English sounds like Basil Bunting. In his first published poem, ‘Villon’, written under the guidance of Ezra Pound in 1925, he had already worked out a brusque music of his own, with ...

Pretorian-born Damon Galgut first came to the notice of British readers in 2003 with The Good Doctor, a dark, disturbing tale of a run-down hospital in the post-Apartheid homelands. It was shortlisted ...

Sebastian Faulks’s fourteenth novel shares many of the preoccupations of the previous thirteen. As in his early trilogy (Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray) and in much of his most ...

A Life Lost and Found by Andrew Graham-Dixon ...

Two events cause Cordell Carmel, a black freelance translator probably in his early or mid-forties, to change every aspect of his life in pursuit of ‘freedom’. The first occurs when he drops in ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...