Early in 1943, Maria Mandl, the tyrannical, sadistic unofficial head guard at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided that the moment had come to form a women’s orchestra. Fiercely jealous of her male ...

Few of the notorious haunted houses in fiction are occupied on the basis of annual contracts overseen by a letting agent: usually it is precisely these houses’ unregulated status that has allowed ...

When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much. Scouting around Penzance for a suitable studio-cum-domicile following the breakdown of her marriage in 1947, she chanced, as ...

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170 after seven years of bitter quarrel with his old friend Henry II, is one of the most well-known and well-documented figures ...

On stage, Harriet Walter always conveys sharp intelligence and humour, which is equally characteristic of her books Other People’s Shoes (1999) and Brutus and Other Heroines (2016). In those books ...

I used to like Elon Musk. There’s an openness to him, an unguarded transparency. While other technoligarchs remodel as Augustus Caesar (Mark Zuckerberg) or a curiously buff Jean-Luc Picard (Jeff Bezos ...

In September 2021, the Swedish writer Johanna Ekström was diagnosed with a fatal melanoma of the eye. She was fifty-one and had been writing for thirty years, publishing fourteen books in various ...

Part-way through Natasha Brown’s new novel, Universality, Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist who recently managed to climb out of the penurious doldrums of lockdown with a long read that went ...

Until recently, the prime minister was the most important person in British politics. But when the New Statesman published its annual list of the most powerful people on the left in June last year, ...

368pp. Cape. £18.99. In Spring he dwells at boldly mimetic length on James’s non-starter of a relationship with Katherine, who is having a muted mid-thirties crisis of her own. Although the novel’s ...

If, like me, you take a voyeuristic pleasure in the acknowledgements pages of books – with the glimpse they offer of the author’s personal life – then academic autobiographies are an almost revelatory ...