If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

‘Populists are rebelling not only against a specific (liberal) type of politics but also against the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy,’ write Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

Protect them Lord in all their fights, And, even more, protect the whites. (From ‘In Westminster Abbey’) Historians of the Second World War have increasingly seen it as a gigantic showdown between the ...

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

Anyone who believes that Gorbachov’s reforms can really change any thing would do well to ponder the contents of this book. Communism, according to Stefan Staszewski, is ‘the rule of the minority over ...

Some novels are hard to review, some are easy. Some are so difficult you don’t know where to begin…but, then, a gift: the author saves you the trouble by more or less reviewing the book for you. So ...

A game played by all of us who work at the literary end of the book trade, and I expect by mere consumers too, is: spot the real classic, the author who will be widely read in two hundred years’ time.

Yu Hua, an author new to me, has written a great deal, sells well in China, and has a sizeable international reputation. This is his first non-fiction work translated – and very nimbly, too, by Allan ...

Mo Mowlam will go down in history for two things. She was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when the Good Friday Agreement, that benighted province’s best chance for peace, was signed, and ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...