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 ...

The image links back to Jane Eyre, sequestered behind the curtain at Gateshead with Bewick’s History of British Birds on her ...

Phenomenal Spirits - Two Women by Jacqueline Rose ...

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

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

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 ...