‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

Until recently, few readers would have been familiar with the painter, cultural ambassador and memoirist Józef Czapski. Born in 1896 into a noble Polish family, Czapski was sucked early in his life ...

Burning Patience is an energetic, charmingly ribald folk-like tale, the third novel by expatriate Chileno, Antonio Skármeta. Set in a small Chilean fishing village, it is the story of the village ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Such is the reputation of accounting among the general public – as tedious, pedantic, incomprehensible and, in a word, boring – that many people will run a mile when they hear that a new book about ...

Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, died one day in 1953, on the little triangular place at the intersection of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail, within sight of both the ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

I was telling my friend Moon Biglow the other day that I was going to Hampstead to see some literary people. ‘Oh, littery people,’ said Moon – because that’s how he talks. ‘Oh, Hampstead!’ said Moon. ...

Yesterday I drove ten minutes from my apartment to a place that delights me: Sormiou, in southernmost Marseille. Not to the famously idyllic calanque (or cove) of that name, but to the hulking Leclerc ...

All swimming pools, however, deal in the unnatural. Southern California is the modern heartland of this glorious folly. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), in which the diversion of water away from ...