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 ...

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 ...

THE ASSAULT ON China’s natural environment has been going on for dennia. Even the most casual traveller notices how few trees, animals and birds remain; and yet a glance at Chinese poems or paintings ...

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

Everybody with an interest in the everyday life of Italians under Mussolini’s dictatorship will have to read Richard Bosworth’s Mussolini’s Italy. Such a book was long overdue. Whilst we have numerous ...

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 opening premise of Tim Blanning’s attractive book is that there were three revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century. More or less simultaneously, the Europeanised world experienced a ...

Historians like to map the present onto the past more than they care to admit. A current fashion is for books on spin, image and media manipulation. Last year Larry Silver produced a remarkable book ...

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 ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...