‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

Last year, visitors to the British Museum’s exhibition ‘Living With Gods’ were greeted by a strange figure carved from a mammoth’s tusk, 31cm tall and 40,000 years old. It had a human body and a ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

Early in the 19th century, there were some 260,000 of them across Britain’s naval and merchant fleets. People called them Jacks, but they are mostly nameless – or nameless to history. Even on ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

Some time before 1973, when Richard Crossman was still editor of the New Statesman, I ambled along to Mr Benn’s substantial residence in Holland Park. My purpose was to talk to him about his proposed ...

Well, how do you read the Literary Review? One review a day? As they come? Picking one anywhere, lured by the title, or the picture, or just the way the pages fall open? Numbers in the Dark is an ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. When Augusto Pinochet arrived in London for medical treatment in 1998, he was surprised to find himself ...

Lucy Moore explores how Baker became the most celebrated American in Paris. Lucy Moore - An American in Paris Lucy Moore: An American in Paris - Fearless and Free: A Memoir by Josephine Baker ...

The Rt Hon Sir Oliver Letwin has written one of the most important books of the year. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable. It’s important in the same way that an injection or ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...