In 1545, the year in which he turned seventy, Michelangelo Buonarroti completed his last public sculpture, the tomb of Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Others might have ...

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Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

The Rt Hon Sir Oliver Letwin has written one of the most important books of the year. But just because it’s important doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable. It’s important in the same way that an injection or ...

ELIZABETH COSTELLO IS , like her creator, John Michael Coetzee, a novelist of world renown. She is also, rather like the reclusive, taciturn Coetzee himself, a fugitive. She is in hiding from the ...

In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his ...

Describing in an American publication her puritan, nonconformist family, Beatrix Potter wrote: ‘I am descended from generations of Lancashire yeomen and weavers, hard-headed, matter of fact folk … ...

Not knowing Adam Thorpe's poetry before, I found it good at first but good of a vaguely familiar kind. After all, we no longer suppose that every poet, still less every poem will be so original as to ...

Future Popes of Ireland begins with gentle blasphemy: ‘It was September 1979 when Pope John Paul II brought sex to Ireland.’ Granny Doyle, aflame with the conviction that she will be grandmother to ...

Few people would disagree with the proposition that the world has become a nastier place in recent years, or that it’s happened very fast, hastened by the growth of social media platforms such as ...

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA came up with a scheme to balloon-drop thousands of copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm into Soviet-controlled Poland. Printed in a compact, user-friendly ...