‘Poor devils’: the hopeful scribblers of the French Revolution
Buoyed by visions of immortality, Parisian hacks were ready to ‘explode’ in revolutionary fervour, but those who didn’t perish in the Terror would often struggle to make a living
Snobbery in the garden: U and non-U borders
When Richard Sudell began promoting pyracantha, hanging baskets and crazy paving in the 1920s, the backlash from the gardening elite was vicious and immediate
Was the French Revolution inevitable?
It was clear for decades in France that unrest was steadily building before public anger finally exploded in the spring of 1789, says Ruth Scurr
The pen and the plant
A sumptuous coffee-table book in which writers from Henry James to Frances Hodgson Burnett are briefly glimpsed while passing through the beautiful spaces that outlast them
A young woman in a hurry
Claire Harman discusses ten of Mansfield’s short stories in connection with her tragically short life
A memorial to the Bonapartes
The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial –…
A city in the grip of Terror
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
Private passions of a public moralist
Ruth Scurr reveals what an impulsive, life-loving individual Mary Wollstonecraft was
The front line of hell
Christopher Hitchens once said that women just aren’t as funny as men and Caitlin Moran believed him. But that was…
Red or dead
There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University…
Acting the part
Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It…
Welcome back to Gilead: Margaret Atwood’s triumphant reclaiming of her work
‘Penises,’ Aunt Lydia muses, ‘them again.’ Penises are always causing trouble, even in the God-fearing dystopian state of Gilead. The…
How Diderot’s pleas to end despotism fell on deaf ears in Russia
Denis Diderot (1713–84) is the least commemorated of the philosophes. Calls for his remains to be moved to the Panthéon…
Who needs a plot? asks Anne Tyler
Willa Drake’s second husband calls her ‘little one’, even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown…
An intense conversation about life, love and writing with Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy draws her epigraph for The Cost of Living from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities: ‘You’re always more unreal to yourself…
Laura Freeman reads her way out of anorexia
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…
From blissful dawn to bleak despair: the end of the revolutionary dream
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey…
Looking for treasure island
It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient…
Fighting for progress
The 17th century scores highly — especially England’s part in it — in A.C. Grayling’s ‘points system’ of history. If only the study of the past were that simple, says Ruth Scurr
Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger behind the fun
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts…
Guardians of an ideal
The French have always favoured grand, elegant abstractions about the human condition, says Ruth Scurr. It’s part of their national identity
All the pomp of family life
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking…
The fear behind the Terror
Why did the French Revolution go so wrong, descending into a frenzied bloodbath in just five years? Because by 1794 all trust had vanished, and the country had literally run out of cash, explains Ruth Scurr
Tales of the Occupation
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has…
