Rilke had few masters, and no disciples; in a literal sense, his work is self-contained. It has never become an undisputed part of the 20th century literary canon, though it illustrates in exemplary ...

Chainless souls are a bit like stray dogs; you feel sympathy for them in theory but you don’t really want to be landed with them for very long. Katherine Frank’s A Chainless Soul, the first biography ...

For cricketers in general and all aspiring captains in particular Brearley’s Art of Captaincy is an excellent book. It covers not only those areas of the game that concern cricket captains but also ...

Time was when, if I revealed I taught the poetry of Wordsworth, people would sidle furtively up to me and ask whether I thought the great man slept with his own sister. The correct answer is yes. Two ...

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...

F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are two of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Among the remarkable things about them are the peculiar similarities and parallels of their ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

At this time of year many readers may be about to holiday in Italy. One indispensable item for the journey is Christopher Duggan’s brilliant and monumental The Force of Destiny, which deserves to be ...

ANYONE WHO WONDERS what feminism is for (as a surprising number of people do) should read this book. It is about a woman whose remarkable achievements were so overshadowed by those of her husband that ...

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 ...

Ever since his brilliant debut collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self has occupied a peculiar and somewhat frustrating position. A fantastically inventive writer of short stories, he ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...