Richard Vinen offers a rewarding portrait of ordinary lives and increasingly mediocre politicians

The great man’s peerless poetry is not the “soppy stuff” of cheap romanticism, but a harsh, unsparing — and often beautiful — look at the world

The story of a shy extrovert, an unprincipled believer, a depressive funster

Art between the wars

A dialectical mind, Lawrence is modern in his resistance to labels

We remain interested in Tocqueville because of the power of his thought, not his life story

Bertrand Russell is almost too familiar a figure to be worth remembering

The relationship between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh was one of all-consuming passion

This new biography of John Donne brings the centuries-dead poet to life

Sweet dreams are made of this