It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

Burning Patience is an energetic, charmingly ribald folk-like tale, the third novel by expatriate Chileno, Antonio Skármeta. Set in a small Chilean fishing village, it is the story of the village ...

Fiona MacCarthy met Walter Gropius (1883–1969) through Jack Pritchard, the British entrepreneur who built Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, an experiment in modernist living where Gropius took up ...

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 ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

I was telling my friend Moon Biglow the other day that I was going to Hampstead to see some literary people. ‘Oh, littery people,’ said Moon – because that’s how he talks. ‘Oh, Hampstead!’ said Moon. ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

Dani is a successful singer who is taking his father’s body from Madrid to be buried in the village where he was brought up. For the forty-year-old, it’s a trip to a Spain he doesn’t know. It’s ...

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 ...

Yu Hua, an author new to me, has written a great deal, sells well in China, and has a sizeable international reputation. This is his first non-fiction work translated – and very nimbly, too, by Allan ...

Hugo Williams has been writing elegantly crafted and accessible poetry for over fifty years. His tone of voice today is not appreciably different from the one that first asserted itself in the 1960s.

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...