Frederick Douglass – runaway slave, radical activist, brilliant orator and writer, tireless advocate for his race, political office-holder – lays claim to being the most influential African-American ...

Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

‘The Indians don’t speak our language, don’t have money or culture. They’re native peoples. How did they end up with 13 per cent of Brazil’s territory?’ Jair Bolsonaro said to an audience in Mato ...

Although his literary works are by no means uniformly successful, Peter Ackroyd may safely be described as an author possessed of genius, and had he died before attaining middle age (like Bruce ...

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 ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

A C Grayling has carved out a niche not only as a lucid and accessible interpreter of philosophy for the general reader but also as a passionate advocate for the role that it can and should play in ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

Chil Rajchman was one of only a handful to survive Treblinka. Unlike Auschwitz, Treblinka was purely an extermination camp, where the only Jews not immediately gassed were Sonderkommandos employed in ...

The last time I picked up a survey of Israeli art it nearly made me miss my flight. The book, Ronald Fuhrer’s Israeli Painting: From Post-Impressionism to Post-Zionism, was intriguing, but not exactly ...

Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz? So runs the chorus of Tom Lehrer’s witty 1965 ballad about Alma Mahler, widow of three artistic luminaries (the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter ...