It focuses unashamedly on the high politics of a tumultuous period that began with Rishi Sunak, the first politician of ...

The nineteenth-century journalist and novelist Harriet Martineau insisted that her letters should never be published, begging the recipients of her correspondence to throw away the incriminating ...

How do the Booker judges choose the best book of the year from the sixty or seventy books they are sent? Their number has been increased from three to five, and literary academics have been less ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Montefiore refuses to treat the Middle East as an exclusively Arab or Muslim arena. Turks, Persians, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, ...

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 ...

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 ...

This is partly because Chabal – a historian of France and the son of a Moroccan-born historian of the Lusophone world – is ...

As the title of his memoir made clear, James did indeed live his life in and through institutions. He was not unique in that ...

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 ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Carol Bruggen’s third novel, its engaging title taken from a Marvell poem, is the tale of Hector, a provincial psychiatrist, his wife and former patient Judith, and the young Susannah, who is his ...