There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would ...

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 ...

Ayn Rand – ‘Ayn’ pronounced ‘I-n’ – was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905. The child star of a bourgeois Jewish family, she was well educated at home and at school until her life was ...

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 ...

When he returned to France from England in 1728, Voltaire joined a consortium to buy the French government’s lottery, which made him serious money. He used some of it to restore a chateau belonging to ...

Clarissa Eden’s 21st-century counterpart is Sir Philip May. They both married short-term prime ministers who failed in crises because of misjudgements that stemmed from their characters. Both Anthony ...

Morning and Evening, the latest novel by the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse to be published in English, is a slim book, but it was a big deal when it first appeared in his home country in 2000. It ...

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, ...

A lot of London has been lost. German bombs didn’t do anything like as much damage as the energy produced by the huge, ever-expanding metropolis itself. In the late 19th century, London was the ...

For Nila, the narrator of award-winning poet Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl, Berlin’s party scene is an escape route from the city’s menacing streets and her own family’s haunting history. But ...

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 ...

Edward VIII’s infatuation with Wallis Simpson was so overwhelming that it seemed to demand an extraordinary explanation. Some insiders concluded that he had gone mad, among them his private secretary, ...