Literature

The 12th century story of King Arthur and his gallant knights is complex, frustrating, and fraught with contradictions and impossibilities. Very few of the names and events recorded in these chronicles exist in the historical record, and so the text represents a huge historical crossword puzzle that is almost impossible to crack. But how can we derive an answer for two-down in this puzzle, if we have not discovered the solution for five-across? Arthurian history is traditionally set in the...

Author Rex Wood has been a regular on the dating scene for over a decade. In that time, the 30-year-old banker, based in London, has been on more than 500 dates, and has slept with over 100 women. To polish his playboy performance, Wood has assiduously kept a ‘sex spreadsheet’ that records the first names, dates and location of every erotic encounter he’s had — as well as details about what was going through his mind from the point of...

Five rare letters penned by British naval commander Lord Horatio Nelson during the Napoleonic Wars are set to go under the hammer - and could fetch a cool £35,000. One scrawling script details Nelson's worries that rumours of Napoleon Bonaparte's impending invasion of Britain were deterring recruits from signing up. In another, Nelson protests that 'not one farthing' was paid to him in the division of prize money, which seamen depended on as a primary source of income. Nelson also...

No, this is not a review of the former Secretary of State's new book What Happened. I rather doubt I shall ever get around to reading it, which actually is not that unusual, even by its purchasers. There was an interesting article by Walt Hickey on the political data site FiveThirtyEight.com the other day that looked into just that. Hickey had to use Audiobook data as people do lie about their reading like drunk salesmen fumbling their way into the family...

I suppose it's a rather good thing that George Martin had lousy taste in neckties. Had he worn something a little more fashionable than a black tie with a red horse motif on June 6, 1962 then presumably after slagging off The Beatles' first demo recording session when Martin then asked four young men from Liverpool 'Is there anything you don't like?' George Harrison would not have replied 'Well, for a start, I don't like your tie.' Cue hilarity, a...

A truly ‘novel’ romantic novel, Bounty of a Stolen Empire is a sharply-written, wryly humorous book that tells the real-life story of Marguerite, Countess of Blessington – one of the most remarkable women of her time but shamefully forgotten by history. Born Margaret Power in 1789, our heroine, begins her tumultuous life in a chaotic, less-than-salubrious home in an Irish backwater.  As a bored child prodigy she finds herself pregnant and sold by her father in matrimony to a man...

For those of you who have come to this review expecting to read about the newest novel featuring The Silence of the Lambs' Dr Lecter, oh dear. So sorry to inform you but the book we're looking at doesn't have anything to do with cannibalism. (Thinking) Which is rather a shame really as if it had, this Hannibal might have been quite livelier and certainly more memorable than the long, dreary slog that shoved its way into my view and...

For once in my life I am going to write a book review like a proper football match report and put the final score in the lead paragraph. Scott Murray's history of the Football League's First Division, The Title is as fine a book on English sport as will be published this year. If I were you, I'd hurry on down to Waterstone's or W.H. Smith (other bookstores are available), buy a copy, then hide it away somewhere before Christmas...

A university has 'banned' a 250-year-old erotic novel over fears students might get offended over the racy book. Royal Holloway, University of London, took Fanny Hill off student's reading lists "in case it upsets them", according a professor at the institution . The novel, also known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, was first published in 1748 and is one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history. Written by John Cleland, it was banned soon after publication...