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 ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

The first novel in Paul Auster’s trilogy has Daniel Quinn, listless widowed mystery writer, receiving a late-night telephone call. The speaker asks for Paul Auster (‘someone he was not’), supposedly a ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín’s third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

How do the Booker judges choose the best book of the year from the sixty or seventy books they are sent? Their number has been increased from three to five, and literary academics have been less ...

Jacqueline Rose’s second novel is an expansive, luminous, if sometimes unwieldy book. Two Women presents the fictionalised biography of two Jewish-born, Christian-convert philosophers: Edith Stein ...

Some years ago, a prominent animal-behaviour scientist hosted a colleague at his field station devoted to the study of chimpanzees. Talking together on top of the observation tower, the pair glanced ...

Ed Conway’s masterly examination of global trade flows and how they have benefited us opens with a debate between the English economists Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), who favoured protectionism, and ...

In the first weeks of 1946, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock started work on a new project. The couple, in their mid-thirties, had moved from New York City to a modest farmhouse in the Long Island ...

It’s a difficult task to evoke a world that is so fully formed, so debauched and scandalous, without making the reader feel like they are sitting on the sidelines, missing out on all the fun. But in ...

Men: do not try too hard with your wardrobes. In the 1980s and 90s, John Berendt wrote a column on men’s clothing for Esquire magazine. He cautioned against the overt posturing involved in wearing ...

I began reading Jeff Jarvis’s Hot Type with some trepidation. The Linotype machine is not an obvious starting point for a ripping yarn. First used commercially in 1886, the Linotype – one of the great ...