WHEN SOLZHENITSYN WROTE his great three-volume classic, The Gulag Archipelago, it had a huge impact, particularly in France. There, since the Second World war, a great part of the reading classes had ...

If one were to hazard a guess as to the largest nature reserve in Europe, Chernobyl would be an unlikely contender. And yet, over the last thirty years, a vast area closed off to all but a few ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

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 ...

From Michel Houellebecq’s Islamicised France in Submission to Lionel Shriver’s vision of an autarkic United States in The Mandibles, the political disaster novel is in vogue and one only has to pick ...

Cleaner, babysitter and general dogsbody Agnès Morel has been a fixture in the cathedral town of Chartres for twenty years. Surrounded by gossipy old mesdames, priests who doubt their vocation and an ...

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 ...

In the days following George W Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on a US warship just returned from the Persian Gulf, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the region in which the West’s ...

I approached this book with low expectations. Ho-hum, I thought, a book about radiation written by a professor of radiation medicine. Probably some dull memoir by a retired old boy. How wrong I was.

Neville Chamberlain was nothing if not a diligent correspondent. Every week he wrote to his sisters Ida and Hilda letters that were in effect a diary of everything he was doing politically. They have ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Publishers are tremendous copycats; and ineffectual copycats at that. Someone scores a hit with Watership Down and, for a few years, you can't get near the children's bookshop without wading through ...