Raymond Radiguet: Mad About The Boy
Cocteau’s poetic protégé was a louche literary wunderkind the world lost too soon
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
The Prophet Isaiah In His Letters
Berlin’s vast correspondence is a true monument to European, Jewish and liberal civilisation
Reader, I Married Him
"English writers have fallen out of love with marriage, and I shared their scepticism — until now."
Iris Murdoch, The Virtuoso Of Virtue
The letters of the great writer reveal affairs with both sexes but also an intense intellectual and spiritual life
The Symphony: A Moral Vision Revealed In Music
Beethoven set the bar impossibly high but composers like myself still regard it as the ultimate challenge
How Olympian Was Renaissance Man?
Leonardo is seen as the presiding genius of his age, but his drawings reveal a reassuringly human artist
Sentimental Nihilism And Popular Culture
Commercial art forms may yet save the Western tradition from its propensity to self-destruction
Music Of The Future Cannot Ignore The Past
Composers who try to create culture in a vacuum will struggle to be heard by a hostile public
Saul Bellow’s Gift: A Life Of Observation
A new biography of the American novelist presents a comic genius who never claimed to be exemplary
The Return Of War
In the era of Putin and Islamic State, we shall have to dust off Clausewitz and confront reality
How the Nazis Lost the War on the West
Three refugees saw the Third Reich as the enemy of civilisation. Today we can learn from their example
Father and son: the Herbert Read I knew
A filial memoir of Britain’s apostle of modernism in art