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 ...

Back in the early 1980s, in the depths of an Oxford winter, I remember trudging through the snow to attend something called the New College Fiction Symposium – a kind of brains trust featuring ...

The Portrait Miniature: A New History draws on the collection of around two thousand miniatures at the V&A to trace almost ...

For Western observers in particular, few Japanese institutions have proved so enduringly exotic: the tattoos, the severed ...

From Denying to Embracing the Inner Lives of Animals, de Waal, who died in 2024, describes the incident with Thai. Thai cared ...

In the first weeks of 1946, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock started work on a new project. The couple, in their mid-thirties, ...

Beast’s meditative introduction, ‘give or take a cryptic message in a lost locket, no concrete evidence of Hector Munro’s ...

It Takes a Village - Generation Maybe: Why We’re Having Fewer Children, and What It Means for Us All by Camilla Cavendish; ...

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 ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

IN HIS THIRTY-FIVE years of life, Paul Nizan was a key intellectual in the French Communist Party. He published three novels, polemical essays, translations and a large quantity of militant journalism ...

Traditional university teaching in the United States used to include a compulsory course on the history of Western civilisation, starting with the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and proceeding by weekly ...