Margaret Atwood has ‘always found snivelling in public embarrassing’. Light on introspection, even lighter on confession, Book of Lives is thus only a memoir ‘of sorts’: a 600-page chronicle of her life and times, in which one of our most celebrated novelists, just turned eighty-six, is determined not to take herself too seriously.  Rolling your sleeves up and getting on with... read more

Describing himself in his mid-fifties as ‘a wambling old codger’, T S Eliot was hardly cut out to be a night-time fire watcher on London’s wartime rooftops. Yet for several nights each week, as first bombs and then V-weapons dropped from the sky, that is what he did. In the most recent volume of his capacious Letters – over a thousand pages covering... read more

Nobody under the age of seventy-five has heard George Orwell’s voice. The only extant video footage is in a silent movie of the Eton Wall Game. None of his many wartime recordings for the BBC Eastern Service has survived. By all accounts his voice, damaged by a bullet to the throat during the... read more

How can we live in a meaningless world? Is there any hope of happiness, when our existence is fundamentally absurd and we must succumb to ‘revolting death’? Should we even bother with life, or just abandon the quest? These are the questions to which Albert Camus returns over and over again in his fiction, essays and plays.  Camus was born in 1913 and brought up in working-class Algiers. His father was killed in 1914 at the Battle of the... read more

Jean-Paul Marat lives in cultural memory as a beautiful corpse, immortalised by Jacques-Louis David, who has him clutching a note pleading for the aid of ‘The People’s Friend’ (the note was in fact a treacherous assassin’s lure). It is a curiously passive depiction of martyrdom for a man who built his political career on frenetic and splenetic activity in writing and in person. David’s sanitised view, useful as it was to a beleaguered national Jacobin establishment... read more

In Mexico City on 27 September 1842, a man was delivering an unusual eulogy. Fixing his eyes on what he called ‘the mutilated remains of an illustrious leader of independence’, the speaker was so moved that he felt he must ‘shed ardent tears over the remains of the hero’ before him. The occasion, however, was not quite as sad as he made out. For the hero, Antonio López de Santa Anna, a general and many times president of Mexico, was listening to the speech. What was being buried, for the... read more