There can’t be many people who care for literature, for all round excellence, who wouldn’t be moved by the fact that Wole Soyinka has, at last, been awarded the Nobel prize. In my opinion he entered ...

Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology.

According to An Economic History of the English Garden, between 1820 and the present day, 15,652 gardening books have been published in the UK alone. That’s not the most astonishing number in this ...

The great financial crisis of 2007–9 was no end of a lesson for the economics profession. Prior to it, hardly any economist drew attention to the global imbalances that had built up in the early 2000s ...

Until recently, few readers would have been familiar with the painter, cultural ambassador and memoirist Józef Czapski. Born in 1896 into a noble Polish family, Czapski was sucked early in his life ...

‘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 ...

In 1937 a horse fell onto Cole Porter’s legs. The left leg was fractured, the right ‘mashed to such a pulp’ that the nerves were permanently damaged. The blistered skin, Porter wrote to a friend, ...

All swimming pools, however, deal in the unnatural. Southern California is the modern heartland of this glorious folly. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), in which the diversion of water away from ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

Burning Patience is an energetic, charmingly ribald folk-like tale, the third novel by expatriate Chileno, Antonio Skármeta. Set in a small Chilean fishing village, it is the story of the village ...

The late fourteenth century was an age of popular rebellion. The Black Death of 1348 opened a long period of economic wretchedness, characterised by epidemic disease, depopulation and deflationary ...

Such is the reputation of accounting among the general public – as tedious, pedantic, incomprehensible and, in a word, boring – that many people will run a mile when they hear that a new book about ...