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 ...

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 ...

Gray’s Anatomy was first published in Britain in 1858, and an American edition appeared the following year. With its terse, descriptive prose and spellbindingly intricate illustrations of the human ...

White Heat is not short of detail. Examining the qualities which made outsider Edward Heath win the race for the Tory Party leadership, Dominic Sandbrook reveals that four different newspapers used ...

American women have been authors for more than three hundred and fifty years. Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers is quite astonishingly the first comprehensive history of these writers. Showalter ...

The first of these two novels concerned with the lives of old men and women in care homes has already achieved the status of international bestseller. It isn’t difficult to see why. Hendrik Groen (a ...

You might shrink from calling a leading Chinese author inscrutable, if that wasn’t the way the Chinese see him too. But Ah Cheng is as much puzzled-over in his homeland as he is widely read. At first ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

Hot on the heels of his massive Armageddon comes another blockbuster from Max Hastings, this time on the death throes of the predatory Japanese Empire, whose final agonies outlived those of Hitler’s ...

‘To take risks,’ said Nietzsche, ‘is to remain scrupulous.’ Few do it better than Peter Ackroyd, the conventional, punctilious surface of his novels habitually undermined by strange metaphysical ...

I once asked a former Oxford classics don which verse translation of Homer he thought was best. He shrugged before saying, ‘Read Homer in Greek, or else in prose.’ On the face of it, this looks like a ...

Plato I know, or at least I thought I did. But a Googleplex? I had no idea. I had heard of a googolplex, which is a really large number, allegedly described by its inventor – a nine-year-old boy – as ...