In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

The Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

You can learn everything you need to know about Alfred Douglas by reading a decent biography of Oscar Wilde. Well, almost everything. From a glance at the photographs in Richard Ellmann’s book, for ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

Asked to name the greatest American poet, Robert Lowell once replied ‘Milton’. The joke had a point to it. Contemporary English poets in the mainstream admire poets like Marvell or Robert Graves who ...

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) first came across one another in 1919, when Blunden submitted a poem to the Daily Herald, of whose books pages Sassoon was briefly in ...

The story that apparently inspired Barclay Price to write this book is of a Chinese man called William Macao who arrived in Britain in or around 1775 as a servant. Thanks to benign employers, he was ...

Many Shakespeares are on the loose: romantic, imperialist, Marxist and deconstructivist ones, to name just a few. They generally don’t get on well. Another, the product of revisionist scholarship, is ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...