In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

Samuel Beckett began Our Exagmination Round his Factification For Incarnation Of Work In Progress, the first ever collection of essays on Finnegans Wake, with the memorable remark that: ‘The danger ...

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 ...

It is like a homecoming. We open the door on a galère of amusingly daffy and improbably named characters whose lives will intertwine for 472 pages: Iris Murdoch scorns readers who find length a ...

Of all the many and wretched women processed through these pages, the luckiest is surely Mildred Martin, who supervised Roth in ‘independent reading’ at Bucknell University. She admired him and has ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

Twenty years ago, in A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood gave an account of a teacher's day which, although marred by its mawkish memories of the hero's dead lover, remains both extremely funny as ...

He was born in Paddington station, became tutor to Einstein, honorary valet to the Duke of Edinburgh, and President of Ireland. He was had up for smuggling and was a musical genius. He was born in ...

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.

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...