In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

ONE CHAPTER OF Bay of Tigers describes the demise of learning at Lubango's School of Letters in Angola. In the 1970s, &er independence from Portugal and in the early stages of the civil war between ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

How naïve we were in the mid-1950s. We saw Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues standing on the great Tien An Men Gate reviewing the masses and wrote of the comradeship of those who had endured the Long ...

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 ...

What is it about the Homeric epics that makes them resound through our culture like the waves of the wine-dark sea? We know very little about ‘Homer’ – theories abound, as they do about Shakespeare, ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

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 ...

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

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 ...

The publication of this correspondence was as eagerly awaited in Germany as an equivalent exchange of letters between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath might have been here. Celan and Bachmann, arguably the ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...