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 ...

This is not a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It is the book. Previous studies, above all the monumental and patient work of Michael Scammell, 'will give you all the facts' – as biographies do in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sylvia Plath began keeping a journal when she was eleven and continued until her death at the age of thirty. This new edition publishes the journals that survive from the last twelve years of her life ...

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 ...

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 ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

‘Nothing is implied in this publication about any person, living or dead, which is not herein explicitly stated.' Thus runs the caveat inside the front cover of this sustained politico-religious ...

The author of this marvelous book is a Polish journalist and it so happens that I know him. We met in Mexico in 1972 when he was correspondent there for the Polish Press Agency. I found him a ...