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 ...

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 ...

Phenomenal Spirits - Two Women by Jacqueline Rose ...

Twenty-six men were raised by Napoleon to the rank of marshal of France; only six fought with him at Waterloo. Jonathan Boff ...

From Denying to Embracing the Inner Lives of Animals, de Waal, who died in 2024, describes the incident with Thai. Thai cared ...

The Portrait Miniature: A New History draws on the collection of around two thousand miniatures at the V&A to trace almost ...

For Western observers in particular, few Japanese institutions have proved so enduringly exotic: the tattoos, the severed ...

In the first weeks of 1946, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock started work on a new project. The couple, in their mid-thirties, ...

Beast’s meditative introduction, ‘give or take a cryptic message in a lost locket, no concrete evidence of Hector Munro’s ...

It Takes a Village - Generation Maybe: Why We’re Having Fewer Children, and What It Means for Us All by Camilla Cavendish; ...

Why do we read ‘true crime’? Early coney-catching pamphlets and broadsides marketed themselves as warnings against criminal ruses practised on the unwary by nips (cutpurses), foists (pickpockets) and ...

Men: do not try too hard with your wardrobes. In the 1980s and 90s, John Berendt wrote a column on men’s clothing for Esquire magazine. He cautioned against the overt posturing involved in wearing ...