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 ...

Memories, memories, ah, fond memories! Flicking rapidly through the above-mentioned tome for the purposes of this review, I could not help but recall those golden days in the early Seventies – or was ...

I’ve become inured over the years to people telling me – in the same tone of voice reserved for inveighing against blood sports – that the theatre is a spoilt brat, a minor art, impoverished in ...

In April 1917, as conflict raged across Europe, the British government reached a crucial decision. Lord Devonport, a grocery magnate taken on by Whitehall as minister of food control, imposed a ban on ...

Arthur Miller seems an ideal subject for a biographer. Works such as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible have a resonance that extends well beyond America and the era in which he wrote them. As ...

I WELL REMEMBER the shock of excitement and the odd feeling of recognition I felt when I encountered Robert Browning half a century ago. When you are trying on different selves in adolescence, ...

It may seem ironic that Paul Auster, a novelist whose work is so entrenched in the side streets and back alleys of New York, was first published in Paris (he translated his debut novel, City of Glass, ...