The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of ...

What makes Roger Scruton so distinctive a figure on the British intellectual landscape is the extraordinary range of his interests and sympathies – aesthetics, architecture, farming, hunting, ...

Cant is one of those kooky, quaint four-letter words which have long since lost their power to offend. Like ‘culture’, the slipperiness of its meaning makes it almost impossible to define, and much of ...

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s captivating autobiographical novels may have been written for children, but they have become primers for mid-19th-century pioneer American history and the hard-won creation myth ...

There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...

Cedilla is not so much a sequel to as a resumption of Adam Mars-Jones’s 2008 novel Pilcrow, which recounted the first dozen or so years in the life of John Cromer: racked and ravaged by terrible ...

Back in 1749, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was intended to be among the grandest in Venice: a five-storey masterpiece of show-off architecture that would dominate its stolid neighbours and overshadow ...

The story that apparently inspired Barclay Price to write this book is of a Chinese man called William Macao who arrived in Britain in or around 1775 as a servant. Thanks to benign employers, he was ...

It is odd to read a novel one simultaneously admires and loathes. The admiration is for the book’s intelligence, lack of sentimentality and often extraordinary phrase-making: the loathing is for the ...

When the novelist Fanny Burney arrived at Windsor Castle in July 1786 to take up a position in the royal household as Second Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, she found herself the object of ...

Rooting around in the basement of a Camden library a couple of decades ago I came across a set of shelves buckling under the weight of the handsome Caxton edition of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, ...

The ‘Tyger’ of my title cannot be unfamiliar to the readers of the Literary Review. Prof. Miner, however, needs a brief introduction. He is Professor Paul Miner, a literary scholar, who is reported to ...