Let's start with the good times. There was his England debut against Romania in 2001 when, aged 21, he scored a record 44 points in a 134-0 win. Hodgson had the misfortune to overlap with Jonny Wilkinson, but when he masterminded an emphatic 32-16...

Alison Rawlinson offered us Children’s Fiction by Rudyard Kipling, some of which is certainly exceedingly good. By way of comparison I thought that these questions seemed pretty much of a level with the set on Agatha Christie in the previous show,...

Mowgli, Shere Khan, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi – he created timeless characters and stories that won’t be forgotten.

Kipling’s poem describes. Moran’s well-researched biographies of historic figures illustrate qualities Kipling found essential to great leadership. getAbstract recommends Moran’s insights to students of history and to good leaders seeking to become great.

Understanding this bizarre inversion, or perversion, of success is one of the things that I set out to do in my book, Hannibal and Me: What History's Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure , inspired by a famous line in a...

He is due to have a private tour of David Hockney's landscapes show at the Royal Academy after we meet. Then he will attend a dinner for the friends and family of Lucian Freud. He sat for both. The Freud portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery's...