Crim con is one of those great eighteenth-century terms. Jaunty and crisp, it sounds like it must be a lot of fun, whatever it means. The unabbreviated phrase, criminal conversation, is a euphemism ...

Margaret Thatcher had many remarkable achievements in her long career, but one of the more curious and far-reaching was her invention of ‘Mr Whippy’ ice cream. Before she embarked on politics she had ...

Professor Charles Esdaile, the author of an excellent history of the Peninsular War, has now followed it up with an even better history of the Napoleonic Wars from the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens ...

It is not hard to understand the continuing fascination with the crimes of Jack the Ripper 130 years on. Besides the shoal of books, there is even a new museum to exploit his ghastliness. The ...

Jung Chang’s book Wild Swans (1991) is a global phenomenon. As of last year, it had sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Its author has been honoured and celebrated in her adopted country, ...

A note from Gboyega Odubanjo’s family at the end of Adam, his posthumously published collection, testifies to the loving efforts of communities – family, friends, editors and other writers – in ...

In 1949, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote an essay in which he claimed the ‘marvellous real’ as the ‘heritage’ of all Latin America. Dismissing the European Surrealists as fakers – ‘dream ...

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 ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

No one who was in Paris on 7 January 2015 will ever forget the fear and horror that coursed through the entire city that day. This was the date of the massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

Novels in which absolutely nothing happens are usually ‘B’ novels, those in Anthony Burgess’s memorable classification that are more concerned with meta-fictional tricksiness, problems of ...