There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...

‘Rawleigh is a great name in our history, and fills a space in our imagination,’ wrote Isaac D’Israeli in 1841. Walter Ralegh’s various extraordinary careers – colonist in Ireland and the New World, ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

Back in the early 1980s, in the depths of an Oxford winter, I remember trudging through the snow to attend something called the New College Fiction Symposium – a kind of brains trust featuring ...

Nothing is more irritating for novelists than the expectation of the public that they will remain true to previous form in every way. Publishers in particular are keen on consistency. There is always ...

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 ...

Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimean War, is one of the icons of British history – the Lady with the Lamp serenely gliding through the hospital wards, the sick and wounded soldiers kissing her ...

It is fourteen years since Dominic Sandbrook published Never Had It So Good, the first part of what was intended to be a three-volume history of postwar Britain. That nine-hundred pager, covering the ...

Edward III has had a hard time of it from historians and biographers. At the beginning of this book, Ian Mortimer rightly points out the often extreme prejudice of Victorian historians against him, ...

For a computer programmer, or indeed anyone at all, Ada Lovelace had the oddest start in life. She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and hence should have been the female incarnation of ...

In the most commonplace sense, Robert Schumann fits the Romantic stereotype: impatient of rules and conventions, a votary of liberal ideals, motivated by instincts, dreams and passions but beset by ...

‘This day his Majesty Charles II came to London after a sad and long exile,’ John Evelyn wrote in his diary on Tuesday 29 May 1660. ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God.’ Not everyone ...