This generous collection of 154 pieces of what Brian Boyd in the introduction calls Nabokov’s ‘public prose’ – mostly uncollected and sometimes also unpublished journalism – is presented ...

Michael Frayn has solved a problem for me. I am often asked to recommend a book that will get interested parties well into philosophy, and find myself at a stand because text-book introductions are ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

The paradox at the centre of High Fidelity is that while pop songs almost always involve love, passion and raw feeling, the kind of men who are most intensely addicted to pop music tend to be a bunch ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

I CAN THINK of many titles for this sometimes intriguing book - 'The Sky, the Sea and the Jungle: Asia and the Surrealists', for example - but I would never have suggested 'A Surrealist Love Triangle' ...

Reading Taki’s High Life column in The Spectator is like being given the key to the door of the secret garden. Once inside you are confronted by all sorts of exotic flora and fauna; ‘Avocato’ Gianni ...

Seventy years after the guns fell silent, India’s part in the Second World War is finally receiving the attention it deserves. The two million Indian combatants (according to Raghu Karnad) – or the ...

On the page they look like nothing. ‘Ruins’, Schumann called Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes. Some are so short, so superficially easy, that they’ve become a staple of ‘Classics for Beginners’ books. It ...

The author of this marvelous book is a Polish journalist and it so happens that I know him. We met in Mexico in 1972 when he was correspondent there for the Polish Press Agency. I found him a ...