'SKINNY D'AMATO'- THE nickname followed by the Italian surname - sounds like a Mob guy. Yet almost every American male in the first half of the twentieth century had a nickname; and there were plenty ...

Something terrible seems to happen to David Cornwell (alias John Le Carré) every time he leaves England or, to be generous, every time he leaves northern or eastern Europe. Give him a drizzle-sodden ...

I once asked a former Oxford classics don which verse translation of Homer he thought was best. He shrugged before saying, ‘Read Homer in Greek, or else in prose.’ On the face of it, this looks like a ...

Rooting around in the basement of a Camden library a couple of decades ago I came across a set of shelves buckling under the weight of the handsome Caxton edition of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, ...

It is one of the intriguing contradictions of the Renaissance that the art for which this period is justly famous was the product of a society mired in corruption and notorious for its violence – on ...

Spin-off biographies are dangerously tempting. Researching a major subject always reveals rabbit holes down which the biographer could happily disappear, never to rejoin the main burrow. Often it’s a ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

Marina Lewycka is one of those novelists whose reviews never quite reflect their huge popularity with actual readers. I managed to miss her bestselling A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, but I ...

This large book is both rewarding and demanding. It offers information in abundance and, like Sir Barry Cunliffe’s previous publications from OUP, it is beautifully written and illustrated. But what ...

Happy families are, famously, not the stuff of fiction. The Cloughs, who are the subject of the prize-winning poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s second novel, are an ordinary, close-knit, middle-class family who ...

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It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...