The Compasses, a dingy pothouse in High Wycombe, was not the most likely place to encounter John Milton, Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. Yet it was here, in March 1794, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...

At Runnymede on 15 June 1215, King John sealed an agreement ‘for the reform of our realm’. At the head of the list of witnessing barons appeared the name of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke (c ...

It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...

Editor’s Note: Barbara Pym died on the 11th January 1980. An afternoon with Miss Pym involved first catching a train to Oxford, transferring there to a line that Dr Beeching forgot, and finally ...

So much seems to have happened in the crowded and explosive place called Europe since the end of the Second World War that it would seem to defy any historian to encapsulate it in one medium-sized ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

According to a list of previous books printed in On the Plain of Snakes, this is Paul Theroux’s fifty-first full-length work. Demoralising news for the sluggish, especially as the new offering is ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I went to a party in Tina Brown’s rooms in Bloomsbury, and was introduced to Alexander Chancellor. I was then working for the New Statesman, correctly recollected in this ...

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...