THE READING PUBLIC has long been divided between those who regard Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great achievements of the post-war novel and the author as England’s answer ...

Few readers, even of Literary Review, will ever match fictional geniuses like Merlin, Mycroft or Marvel’s Iron Man. But Thomas Harriot came close. He was a humbly born Oxford scholar ‘of pregnant ...

An ‘Arch-Mediocrity who presided rather than ruled’ over a ‘Cabinet of Mediocrities’ – Benjamin Disraeli’s sneering dismissal of Lord Liverpool, prime minister during the turbulent years from 1812 to ...

Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimean War, is one of the icons of British history – the Lady with the Lamp serenely gliding through the hospital wards, the sick and wounded soldiers kissing her ...

THINK OF A vast area, inhabited by a small population of deeply religious people, and occupied by the Chinese, who despise the local culture and crush dissent. Tibet, surely. Could be - but this ...

'Poets make the best topographers', W. H. Hoskins has said, with Wordsworth in mind, and Margaret Drabble's fine survey of British landscape as seen through literary eyes from Celtic times until our ...

In his introduction to Eminent Edwardians Dr Piers Brendan tells us his work 'follows Strachey's pattern and attempts to unlock an age by means of a few key figures' whose "eminence was global".' He ...

The eponymous well heeled juvenile duo whose adventures make up the core of this new American film accept without question the wealth that quite obviously surrounds them – luxurious apartments in a ...

An Englishman's first visit to New York may well be a bewildering experience; but to make such a visit while attending his first American Musicological Society Conference could cause him to lose all ...

Buffs of Catcher In The Rye will remember that novel's test of a good novel: if reading it makes you want to telephone the writer like a friend. Holden Caulfield, at large in the universe of the ...

In Victorian times it used to be said that the worst boss is the one who has been a worker. What has happened in Soviet Russia, and particularly in the arts, unfortunately bears out the perennial ...

A whole section of the art of critical self-defence is devoted to the docketting and pigeonholing of 'difficult' writers: it saves one from the ghastly business of actually reading and forming an ...