This is the singular and spectacular trajectory of George Forster, subject of Andrea Wulf’s irresistible new biography.

In this engaging and well-researched book, Ollie Randall sets out to show how cricket and literature worked in a symbiotic ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out ...

In the capital, Tallinn, an air of indigence hung over the Soviet shops where Estonians queued hopefully for scrag ends of ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

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 ...

Allen Lane, the man who founded Penguin Books and made of it a national institution, rarely talked about himself, but when he did it was to the point: ‘I have got a little barrier around myself that I ...

When the American journalist Suzy Hansen first arrived in Istanbul in 2007 on a research trip for an NGO, the promise of a ...

The Spinster Cookbook is not so much a guide to dishes to cook – the first recipe appears on page 77 and it is basically toast – as an exhortation to live the good life in a kitchen of one’s own. If ...

Her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely loveable … one of her rare expressive looks was something to ...

More than this, he sees the assaults of the 1980s as intensely damaging not only to Oxbridge, but to British culture more ...