Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

‘The English humorists!’ V S Pritchett once wrote. ‘Through a fog compounded of tobacco smoke, the stink of spirits and the breath of bailiffs, we see their melancholy faces.’ If the jury is still out ...

In September 2004, Pauline Terreehorst, then director of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, spotted a vintage Gucci suitcase coming up for auction as part of a job lot. Having long coveted such an ...

Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's anti-hero, George Smiley. But is this the missing link in le Carré’s oeuvre, asks @ddguttenplan, ...

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 ...

The penalty kick has served many purposes in books. In Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s stats-driven study Soccernomics, there’s a chapter on the shoot-out at the 2008 Champions League final, the ...

Credit Suisse, founded as Schweizerische Kreditanstalt by Alfred Escher in 1856, was once an engine of Switzerland’s modernisation, funding both railways and infrastructure. However, by the time of ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

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 ...

Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's anti-hero, George Smiley. But is this the missing link in le Carré’s oeuvre, asks @ddguttenplan, ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been presented as a prototypical crusader, a paragon of religious toleration and the progenitor of a united Spain. David Abulafia goes in search of ...