Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

Stephan Thernstrom, 56, a professor at Harvard University for 25 years, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars of the history of race relations in America. He has tenure. He has won prizes and ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

A lot of London has been lost. German bombs didn’t do anything like as much damage as the energy produced by the huge, ever-expanding metropolis itself. In the late 19th century, London was the ...

The production and export of cars, machinery and chemicals lay behind the German ‘economic miracle’ of the 20th century. Yet the German economy is now struggling. @HowardJDavies considers who is to ...

Jonathan Coe’s latest book turns out to be a bag of tricks, but it starts sedately enough. Phyl, a recent English graduate, is back living with her parents, Joanna and Andrew, making puns about ...

When Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine, his hardline views were already widely known. Supporters admired him for his clarity of vision, especially on the ...

Marie Antoinette as few had seen her before. Perched on the edge of her seat on the way to her execution, arms bound, lank hair poking free of a decidedly unglamorous cap, David’s queen looks resigned ...

In late 2022, at the G20 summit held at a balmy resort in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, bumped into the supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping. The encounter, which was ...

In June 2001, I was at a reception for the president of South Africa at Windsor Castle, deep in conversation with that county’s minister of tourism and irritated that someone was insistently tapping ...