In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been presented as a prototypical crusader, a paragon of religious toleration and the progenitor of a united Spain. David Abulafia goes in search of ...

‘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, ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's ...

Thom Gunn started out as a member of the Movement, that 1950s collection of like-minded British poets, but he looks now like a consistent outsider. When he left England and went to America, he ...

Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's anti-hero, George Smiley. In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been presented as a ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's ...

In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his ...

Mohamed bin Laden was born in 1908 (or thereabouts) in the town of Doan in what is now Yemen. His father died when he was still a young boy and, as a teenager, he left home to find work, first in ...