‘Quien es?’ The last words of William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, have obsessed many people. ‘Who is it?’ is a simple enough question to ask in a darkened room where you think a friend is sleeping, ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

I have been thinking a good deal recently about the night side of the arts of Regency England. Choosing a selection of reverse-lit, partly transparent Regency prints for a small exhibition has led me ...

Between 1918 and 1922, Oswald Spengler published the two volumes of his The Decline of the West. The title gnawed at the minds of the intelligentsia and sent them searching for evidence of the ...

The British Library’s immense and absorbing exhibition on the lives of medieval women offers some eye-widening ironies as well as surprises. The curators aim to ‘upend conventional assumptions’ about ...

Diarmaid Ferriter is a historian in a hurry. Since his appointment as professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD) in 2008, at the age of thirty-six, he has astonished ...

The house across the street from mine – an ordinary two-storey Victorian terrace owned by an absent landlord – has a buddleia growing from a crack in its parapet. It’s a curiously ambiguous sight.

This morning I woke up laughing from a dream. It was about two young men and their podcast. The gist of it was that they reviewed things. Not books but ephemera, offering waspish assessments of ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

For the modernist designer Enid Marx, folk art, or what she called ‘popular art’, was ‘hard to define though easy enough to recognise when seen’. Marx and her partner, the historian Margaret Lambert, ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

One piece of Tolkien lore that last year’s expanded edition of The Letters of J R R Tolkien made abundantly clear was quite how highly the author regarded himself as a poet. In 1916, aged twenty-four, ...