‘Hold off on that scruffy pre-loved copy you thought of buying,’ M John Harrison urged readers last October on his blog Ambiente Hotel, announcing the forthcoming Serpent’s Tail reprint of his 1992 ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

Samuel Palmer (1805–81) is the quintessential English Romantic painter, even more so than William Blake. Like Blake he loved poetry, especially Milton. But whereas Blake worked out his images in ...

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...

THE ASSAULT ON China’s natural environment has been going on for dennia. Even the most casual traveller notices how few trees, animals and birds remain; and yet a glance at Chinese poems or paintings ...

IT WAS THOMAS Mann who first made the surprising comparison between Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. Both men, he said, had the same irrepressible and irresponsible desire to shock, and both cultivated the ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Taichi Yamada’s In Search of a Distant Voice was published in Japanese in 1989, completing a trilogy of novels which includes the ghostly Strangers, published to acclaim in English last year. His ...

The days are long gone when philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition could airily dismiss Heidegger’s magisterial Being and Time as based on a mistake of language. His central importance in twentieth ...

Few readers, even of Literary Review, will ever match fictional geniuses like Merlin, Mycroft or Marvel’s Iron Man. But Thomas Harriot came close. He was a humbly born Oxford scholar ‘of pregnant ...

‘I hope these disparate pieces add up to something’, writes Martin Amis with uncharacteristic diffidence in his introduction to this collection of occasional journalism ‘offered with all generic ...

To choose sides in the literary feud between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov is almost to make a political (even moral) confession. The two men, at least at first glance, embodied very different ...