Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

WHEN SOLZHENITSYN WROTE his great three-volume classic, The Gulag Archipelago, it had a huge impact, particularly in France. There, since the Second World war, a great part of the reading classes had ...

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 ...

‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, ...

The English author who perhaps most closely resembled Stefan Zweig was his near-contemporary Somerset Maugham. Maugham lived longer, and wrote more full-length novels and fewer biographical and ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

Simon Mawer’s new novel, about a female secret agent, is billed as a good old-fashioned adventure story, albeit one which is subtly subverted by the presence of a female heroine in a masculine world.

‘The hope is that this body of law will serve as a barrier against the collective wickedness, greed and folly of any nation’, wrote Martha Gellhorn as she watched the twenty – one German leaders being ...

White Heat is not short of detail. Examining the qualities which made outsider Edward Heath win the race for the Tory Party leadership, Dominic Sandbrook reveals that four different newspapers used ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...