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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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.

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 ...

‘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, ...

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 ...

It’s twenty-five years since the death of Iris Murdoch, so I’ve been rereading John Bayley’s Iris Trilogy, one of the strangest memoirs in literary history. The books, written as if in a fugue state, ...

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 ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...