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 ...

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the ...

‘To capture the fish is not all of the fishing,’ insisted that dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey; and, whilst that may be true enough, I feel my spirits sink whenever I see an angling book promoted ...

Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...

In her second novel, Mary Lawson returns to the fictional setting of her first – Crow Lake. The lake, in the far north of Canada, proves an apt metaphor for her narrative: ‘the silvery ever-moving ...

A few years before his death in 1900, Henry Sidgwick, the founding president of the Society for Psychical Research, despairingly conceded that ‘we have not, and are never likely to have, empirical ...

While on holiday three years ago in Taormina, Sicily, I found in a souvenir shop swimming trunks in the Italian colours with a picture of Mussolini in full military fig. The bathers bore the caption ...

The day before he died, Sir Jack Cohen, founder of Tesco, paid a surprise visit to a big new store in Essex. After a triumphal tour in his wheelchair, he asked to be taken up to the balcony ...

The Lisbon earthquake is the most famous natural disaster in European history. In the space of little more than an hour on the morning of 1 November 1755, while much of the city’s population was at ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

‘I am not an Afro-pessimist,’ writes Paul Theroux, looking back on a journey that has taken him from the slums of Cape Town to the musseques of Luanda. You could have fooled me. The Last Train to Zona ...

In 1990 a brown-paper parcel came to light in the strongroom of the solicitors firm Linklaters and Paines in London. It had been deposited there in 1947 and had been addressed to Parr’s Bank, Regent ...