Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages; famous names – Andy Warhol, Robert Kennedy, W H Auden, Norman Mailer, Joseph Brodsky, Jasper Johns – pop up with dizzying... read more

We know the big picture: how nineteen men hijacked four aircraft on 11 September 2001 and crashed them into the Twin Towers in New York, into the Pentagon in Washington, DC and, not by design, into a field in Pennsylvania, with the immediate loss of 2,977 lives (not counting those of the hijackers). Much... read more

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by having the ever-critical eye of Queen Victoria hovering over his work. The resulting exhaustive hagiography... read more

Years ago, as a hardcore cyclist with miles in my legs, I used to dash along with the Dunwich Dynamo, an overnight mass cycle ride from Hackney to the Suffolk coast. By far the most daunting obstacles were the drunks and geezers pouring out of the nightclubs of Romford... read more

A friend who plies his trade as a bookseller in Cornwall tells me that the only person who can compete with his level of physical grunt work, humping boxes into his van and armfuls of dusty books onto his shelves, is the local dry-stone waller. In Wigtown, Scotland, where Shaun Bythell scrapes a living in his draughty second-hand bookshop... read more

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or two later, turns out to be science fiction. The opening gives it the whole nine yards: 'Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our... read more