In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Prominent in Stalinist propaganda of the 1930s, the metaphor of the path features heavily in Martin Sixsmith’s 1,000-year history of Russia. Presiding over a sprawling Eurasian landmass unsecured by ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

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 ...

Novels in which absolutely nothing happens are usually ‘B’ novels, those in Anthony Burgess’s memorable classification that are more concerned with meta-fictional tricksiness, problems of ...

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The English author who perhaps most closely resembled Stefan Zweig was his near-contemporary Somerset Maugham. Maugham lived longer, and wrote more full-length novels and fewer biographical and ...

Dorling Kindersley, otherwise known as DK, was one of the greatest publishing phenomena of recent times. Springing up from nothing in a back bedroom in Kennington in 1974, it was the brainchild of ...

In 1798 the British Empire in the Mediterranean was confined to Gibraltar. After Nelson’s victory at the Nile, Minorca and Malta were added to the portfolio; but such way stations on the central sea ...

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 ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

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 ...