The publisher’s hype for Call the Midwife does Jennifer Worth few favours. ‘Appeals to the huge market for nostalgia … Jennifer is a natural-born storyteller. She’ll be perfect for publicity … Misery ...

There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

Kazuo Ishiguro has been widely praised for his ‘Japanese’ virtues as a writer: delicacy, subtlety, quiet irony, watercolour tones, etc. The fact that he was born in Japan and set his first two novels ...

ANYONE WHO WONDERS what feminism is for (as a surprising number of people do) should read this book. It is about a woman whose remarkable achievements were so overshadowed by those of her husband that ...

Clement Attlee lacked most of the qualities that make for success in politics. He was almost cripplingly shy and self-effacing. His appearance was unimpressive, his speeches uninspiring, his lack of ...

THE SCOPE OF contemporary US dominance is unparalleled in human history. America has 752 military facilities in 130 countries, some of them until recently part of the Soviet empire. What the American ...

William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp (1872–1938), was a cabinet minister, a Knight of the Garter and lord steward of the Royal Household. Married to Lettice Grosvenor, sister of Bendor, Duke of ...

HE WAS AN odd fellow, J L Carr. I first met hm in 1988 at a writers’ conference at York University. Despite the fact that he was a celebrated novelist who had been twice shortlisted for the Booker ...

Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

Norman Lewis only just scraped into The Oxford Companion to English Literature in his tenth decade, three years before his death in 2003. Even then, it was the briefest of entries, naming merely two ...