In 1545, the year in which he turned seventy, Michelangelo Buonarroti completed his last public sculpture, the tomb of Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Others might have ...

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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 ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Not knowing Adam Thorpe's poetry before, I found it good at first but good of a vaguely familiar kind. After all, we no longer suppose that every poet, still less every poem will be so original as to ...

ELIZABETH COSTELLO IS , like her creator, John Michael Coetzee, a novelist of world renown. She is also, rather like the reclusive, taciturn Coetzee himself, a fugitive. She is in hiding from the ...

Describing in an American publication her puritan, nonconformist family, Beatrix Potter wrote: ‘I am descended from generations of Lancashire yeomen and weavers, hard-headed, matter of fact folk … ...

Future Popes of Ireland begins with gentle blasphemy: ‘It was September 1979 when Pope John Paul II brought sex to Ireland.’ Granny Doyle, aflame with the conviction that she will be grandmother to ...

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in which he anticipated how we would spend our time a hundred years ahead. Keynes ...

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA came up with a scheme to balloon-drop thousands of copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm into Soviet-controlled Poland. Printed in a compact, user-friendly ...

‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first ...

It is like a homecoming. We open the door on a galère of amusingly daffy and improbably named characters whose lives will intertwine for 472 pages: Iris Murdoch scorns readers who find length a ...