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 ...

This is the first book devoted to the history of the British country house library. Mark Purcell was the libraries curator at the National Trust from 1999 to 2015, and his text is naturally arranged ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Sir Vidia Naipaul lives with his wife Nadira in Wiltshire, in a house surrounded by fields, with the River Avon running past the foot of the garden. Outside the study window a roe deer and fawn stand ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

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 ...

MAPS ARE MUCH too important to be left to geographers and travellers. For centuries they were left to them, and treasures of incalculable value were lost as a result. We have stories of the great ...

"Biological War: A Scenario" by Annie Jacobsen - review by Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (fmr commander of British CBRN defense forces) When Donald Trump fired him after just eleven days, @Scaramucci ...

Julian Bell's Mirror of the World naturally invites comparison with E H Gombrich's The Story of Art, now in its sixteenth edition and reprinted every year but one since it was first published by ...

The late journalist Deborah Orr’s moving memoir of her Lanarkshire childhood is about many things but, unwittingly perhaps, it does demonstrate how extremely difficult it is to describe one’s parents.

For a book that consists so largely of summary accounts of political madness and murder, Black Mass is surprisingly exhilarating. That may be the result of its almost equally surprising organisation.