Longstanding readers of Literary Review.might recall the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul. In 2003, after an argument with its manager, my late friend and co-author of a guide to Afghanistan, Matthew ...

Swedish journalist Jonas Jonasson’s second novel, The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, hurtles along with all the energy, pace and improbability of his first, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed ...

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 ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

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 ...

Catherine Millet is the girl who can't say 'non'. Editor of the highly-regarded Art Press, she has made it her life's work to sleep with as many men as possible (she has always, she says, had a thing ...

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: ‘The history of empires is the history of human misery.’ The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is ...

Few who witnessed it will forget the euphoria that swept France on 10 May 1981 when François Mitterrand was elected president of the republic – it was over a quarter of a century since a left-wing ...

Samuel Beckett began Our Exagmination Round his Factification For Incarnation Of Work In Progress, the first ever collection of essays on Finnegans Wake, with the memorable remark that: ‘The danger ...

A Life by Gerald Martin ...

Jacobsen’s hypothetical scenario centres on a genetically modified strain of plague, one of history’s most devastating ...

There are a few species of spiders that are dangerous to humans, but the chances of getting bitten by one, much less of becoming ill or dying from the bite, are infinitesimal. Spiders do not infect us ...