Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art. @StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at. ‘I ...

When her partner lost his leather-bound vintage Hermès diary, Brigitte Benkemoun, a journalist in France, helped him find a replacement on eBay. A few days later, the substitute diary arrived, looking ...

Spies and Scholars could be entitled ‘Rogues and Impostors’ given the character of many of those Russians entrusted by their government, the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg and commercial backers ...

Michael Foot is a soldier and a scholar, which is a rare combination. He is a gentleman, too, something less identifiable nowadays. One of his principal subjects is Gladstone’s papers; the other is ...

Nicholas Shakespeare’s first novel since 2010 is a literary thriller set in a damp, wintry Oxford. The book’s protagonist will be familiar to Shakespeare’s regular readers: John Dyer appeared in his ...

Ring Down the Curtain - The Critic by Anand Tucker (dir) ...

It would be impossible to write a dull biography of James Lovelock – as is confirmed by this welcome book by Jonathan Watts, global environment editor at The ...

Medieval documents – both books and individual documents, such as charters – survive in remarkable quantities. Neil Ker’s Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, which gives details about holdings ...

In late 2022, at the G20 summit held at a balmy resort in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, ...

‘If there is an occupation for which women are utterly unfitted, it is that of the detective,’ claimed the Manchester Weekly Times in 1888 – already behind the times, it seems, as women had been ...

After writing a string of award-­winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken the glamour of the Mughals and the murky dealings of the English East ...

It is hard to think of a person more qualified to write this book. In addition to being an art historian, a prolific writer, a lecturer and a broadcaster, James Stourton is also a former chairman of ...