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. ...

‘Do you hear voices?’ It’s not always wise to answer in the affirmative. In a famous experiment in 1973, the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan and seven other perfectly sane people requested ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

A political scientist working at Birkbeck College, London, Eric Kaufmann is ‘a quarter Latino and a quarter Chinese’. He was raised in Canada but his father’s family was of Czech-Jewish background.

Every 9 November during the Third Reich, Hitler and his minions performed a solemn memorial rite for comrades killed during the struggle for power. The day that properly commemorated the dead of the ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...

It seemed, at the time, like the most surreal of fictions: US Senators quoting The Exorcist, debating pubic hairs in Coke cans and discussing the exploits of Long Dong Silver. Unfortunately, it was ...

How to ruin a film - a short guide by @TWHodgkinson: Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops ...

So, who told the biggest whoppers? Was it Amerigo Vespucci, the oily Florentine who claimed to have discovered America a year before Columbus, thus succeeding in having the New World named after him?

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 ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...