In 1992, Joseph Brodsky published Watermark, a book-length essay that brings together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any other season – and a series of powerful and ...

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

‘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 ...

Some years ago, staying in Alsace, I was asked if I would be interested in visiting a Nazi concentration camp in the vicinity. I had never heard of the place, Natzweiler, and had no idea that such an ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

With Eisenhower’s armies closing in on Hitler’s Reich in the spring of 1945, Allied intelligence experts warned of a last-ditch stand by the Nazis in an Alpine redoubt and of a nationwide ‘Werewolf’ ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

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 ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

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 ...