What a difference a decade makes. In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested ...

The Rub of Time, Martin Amis’s new collection of literary essays and journalism from the past three decades, sits in a broad valley of subject matter, between the Olympus governed by the ghost of ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Any book with the title The Bell of Treason should be a warning to us that we are about to read a morality tale. While ‘Munich’ – the Munich conference of 1938 – has long been a byword for appeasement ...

In October 1948 a 37-year-old Waffen-SS officer named Fritz Knöchlein was tried before a British military court in Hamburg for a particularly nasty and gratuitous war crime. It had happened eight ...

Aristotle and Plato – their names conjure up thoughts of stone busts showing serene elderly men with long curly beards. Perhaps these revered Greek philosophers really did look like that at some stage ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

At the end of Richard Flanagan’s new novel, the protagonist, a failed novelist called Kif Kehlmann, reflects that experience is the ‘most illusory of art’s myths, the nonsense that we must go beyond ...

When asked in 1972 about the significance of the French Revolution, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai reportedly quipped, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ But while the meaning of the revolution in France could ...

Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz? So runs the chorus of Tom Lehrer’s witty 1965 ballad about Alma Mahler, widow of three artistic luminaries (the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter ...

This is the story of obsession with a building. It centres first on the man who built it, then on a man who was desperate to live in it, and finally on a man who saw living in it as the height of his ...

Often books about the Third Reich have a last chapter called ‘Götterdämmerung’ or ‘Twilight of the Gods’. The Wagnerian link seems apt; wasn’t the anti-Semitic German nationalist Hitler’s favourite ...