This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

IN HIS THIRTY-FIVE years of life, Paul Nizan was a key intellectual in the French Communist Party. He published three novels, polemical essays, translations and a large quantity of militant journalism ...

Dan Rhodes was included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list in 2003. His funny, misanthropic first novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home, was ample justification for it. He also famously wrote ...

Chainless souls are a bit like stray dogs; you feel sympathy for them in theory but you don’t really want to be landed with them for very long. Katherine Frank’s A Chainless Soul, the first biography ...

For cricketers in general and all aspiring captains in particular Brearley’s Art of Captaincy is an excellent book. It covers not only those areas of the game that concern cricket captains but also ...

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 ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are two of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Among the remarkable things about them are the peculiar similarities and parallels of their ...

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 ...

The paradox at the centre of High Fidelity is that while pop songs almost always involve love, passion and raw feeling, the kind of men who are most intensely addicted to pop music tend to be a bunch ...

Back in the early 1980s, in the depths of an Oxford winter, I remember trudging through the snow to attend something called the New College Fiction Symposium – a kind of brains trust featuring ...