Fagin is only 12 when he leaves a crowded Jewish ghetto in Italy and sets out on the long march to England. He is an "apprentice". His mother has been well paid for his services, and any money he saves (much is promised) will be remitted home.

He leaves to a hero's farewell, but London turns out to be squalid. Fagin joins the other Italian expats in Farringdon, darns old [...]

The music of the English countryside drifts ever more faintly over our subsidised hedgerows, and the long tradition of English pastoral has wilted down to occasional if bitter rows about fox-hunting, rural post offices and country bus routes. In modern, supermarket Britain, the threads that tie daily life to our ancient rural heritage have loosened to the point of unravelling. The property pages still burst with spectacular scenery, and rooms [...]

The Rev Philip Elton, almost handsome, by no means stupid, and nicely situated in the vicarage at Highbury, has no reason to fear any obstacles to his social ascent. He is a capable, popular cleric, a zealot in parish matters, a reliable visitor of the poor - and quite the gentleman in the company of ladies.

He is even making a ripple, if not a wave, in polite circles. The [...]

It now seems almost inevitable that, some day soon, a furious gang of religious extremists, their imaginations stunted by an excess of faith, will carry out a lethal terrorist attack on a famous London landmark. If this comes to pass, it will no doubt be presented as unprecedented devilry, the malignant intrusion of a foreign creed. But religious terrorism is nothing new, and once again, in a tradition stretching back [...]

In The New Confessions, published in 1987, William Boyd wasted little time in giving his young hero a piece of his mind: "Make your own rut," he said (through a third party, naturally). "It's the only way." It is a typical Boyd moment: a mordant English parody of America's follow-your-dream ideology, delivered with few frills. It also happens to be good freewheeling advice: the kind of thing Robert Browning might [...]

In the summer of 1903, the inhabitants of Great Wyrley, a farming village a day's walk north of Walsall in Stafford- shire, were listening out for bumps in the night. Someone had been slitting the bellies of horses, cows and sheep. A pit pony had bled to death. It was recreational slaughter, and people wanted a swift arrest.

The police went after a 27-year-old solicitor, son of the local vicar [...]

The low point in this encyclopaedic history of the 1960s comes in the first sentence, when it emerges that Dominic Sandbrook has chosen to begin with the Lady Chatterley trial. It is a nerve-racking start. Books about the Sixties, whether they swoon over the dawn of a sexy new era of personal freedom or jeer at its wanton indiscipline, are eleven a penny, belonging to the same publishing category as [...]

Most writers who object to the class system come at the subject from below. In demanding a more equal society, they denounce the greed and fat-headedness of the ruling class, and protest at the affronts to human dignity that dance in the service of wealth and power. Ferdinand Mount is not a writer of this sort. A one-nation Tory - and the holder (as he fetchingly concedes) of "a semi-dormant [...]

I happened to be at the Edinburgh Book Festival when Paula Radcliffe lay down and wept. Which was lucky, because Edinburgh turned out to be a good place from which to inspect the ruins of that very well-documented Olympic dream. Not surprisingly, the festival chit-chat couldn't help turning to the "drama" unfolding in the cradle of civilisation, and I half-expected some quick-witted producer to mount a sardonic re-enactment of this [...]

The slim red cross of St George has been making a comeback for some years now, and no one has waved it more eagerly than football fans. Given the frequency with which they end up dazed by beer, as they wrangle with the police in some faraway country, this has not always been a happy association. Much has been made of the class divisions it illuminates: St George might be [...]