Nicholas Clifford

Listen to Dangerous Days with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience.Dangerous Days opens in a still neutral America, though within a year the country will have joined the European alliance against the Central Powers in the...

Macaulay's review essay on Frederick the Great of Prussia is found in vol. iii of his Critical and Historical Essays, and concentrates primarily on the ways in which he built Prussia up into a major military power. Though it's impossible to read the...

Howell’s novel is set in New York of the late nineteenth century, a city familiar to readers of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Basil March, a businessman from Boston of a literary bent, moves with his family to New York to edit a new journal founded...

Set in Florence's Anglo-American colony in the late 19th century, this is a romantic story of a middle-aged man, returning to the scene of his first but disappointed love twenty years earlier. The doings of Americans abroad were staples of the...

A splendid example of travel writing at its best, in this description of six week tour in France -- from Touraine, down to Provence, then back up north -- made by Henry James in 1882, and first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1883-1884. - Summary...

Robert Clive was, in Macaulay’s view, the real founder of British power in India. Macaulay himself served on the Governor’s Council in India from 1834 to 1838, working on legal and educational changes in that country. In his view, the establishment of...

Today the world is awash with “celebrities” whose only accomplishment is being celebrated by the media in all its various forms. Henry James, of course, long pre-dates the multiplicity of media in today’s world, when the press was the main source of...

Princess Casamassima can be read on several levels: first, as a political and social novel, exploring the anarchistic and revolutionary underground of London in the 1880s; secondly as a psychological study of such a movement on a young man (the...

In order to liven up the literary history of Great Britain in the 1890s (as if Oscar Wilde, Stevenson, Kipling, Hardy, etc., were not lively enough) Max Beerbohm wrote short biographies of six imaginary writers. Though their works of course no longer...

Warren Hastings is Chapter IV of Thomas Macaulay's Critical and Historical Essays, vol. III. It first appeared in the Edinburgh Review of October 1841 as a review of Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, first Governor-General of Bengal. Compiled...