Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

Ill Fares the Land must surely be one of the most remarkable books on politics to have appeared for a very long time. A part of the book’s compelling interest comes from the circumstances in which it ...

As director of animal sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy, ethologist Jonathan Balcombe is someone I am unlikely to meet propping up the bar at the Flyfishers’ Club, ...

To summarise a Le Carré plot is to deflate it, for his peculiar merit is to soar above reality. Yet some explanation is needed, even if it brings the tale down to bump along the surface of the real ...

PETER ACKROYD SEEMS to be everywhere you look at the moment. His TV series on London has only just left our screens; a short biography of Chaucer was published a few months ago; and it doesn't seem ...

Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

‘Always historicise!’ With this resounding imperative, Fredric Jameson opens his third major work of Marxist literary theory, of which the precursors were Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House ...

Richard Nixon was a bad man but an effective conservative – a conservative not in the ideological sense (cutting taxes, throwing bums off welfare) but in the sense of a statesman who tries to navigate ...

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

England is dotted with hundreds of castles, some in ruins, some still inhabited. They remain the most romantic and popular historic buildings in the country, visited by millions every year. For ...

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sprawling work of social portraiture stuffed with allusions to Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Although it is set between 1996 and 2001, its themes are urgently ...