This book is, in its sly way, far more substantial than it might at first seem – more, indeed, than it presents itself as being. Colm Tóibín’s subject is the influence of their fathers on the artistic thought, attitude and writings of three great Irish literary artists: Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats and James Joyce. What Tóibín has produced... read more

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly aware of the historical importance of the diaries, and before he died he appointed D R Thorpe as their editor... read more

Lucian Freud was never short of confidence. In the 1990s he painted a small head of an especially rich individual and demanded a stunning £800,000 for it. The sitter demurred. In 2002 this very obvious likeness was displayed at a big Freud exhibition at Tate Britain with the title Head of a Man. It seemed like a snub, but Freud’s titles were unpredictable: sometimes a... read more

In 1905, defeated by Japan and facing insurrection in the major cities and financial catastrophe, Russia’s tsar and his government were forced to retreat from autocracy and create a parliament (the Duma). Censorship, already weak and inconsistent... read more

In his lifetime, Franz Kafka was not exactly a runaway success. His first book, Meditation, a collection of eighteen prose poems, was published in an edition of eight hundred copies and soon vanished. His second book, A Country Doctor, was mentioned by only one reviewer; Kafka’s father did not deign even to open it... read more

Anglo-Saxon London suffers from an image problem, or more precisely from the problem that we have no image of it at all. In contrast to the showy glamour of Roman Britain, with its amphitheatres, temples and abundance of literature, or the vibrant cultural melting pot of the Tudor era, the Anglo-Saxon metropolis... read more