In Berlin at the end of the 1920s, a set of fake Van Goghs sent the art world reeling. The paintings had passed through the hands of Otto Wacker, an obscure Berlin art dealer, and had long been ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Out of their cupboards they come tumbling, the skeletons thrust there in haste, or tucked neatly in, locked away by several or furtively concealed by one. William Trevor has brought out a new book and ...

My Life with Wagner is a sensitive and revealing book, worth reading as a document of how Western art reflects on itself, its achievements and its anxieties. Some readers might experience many of ...

‘He is America,’ Ezra Pound observed of Walt Whitman. ‘His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America.’ Never frightened of being called crude, Whitman would have appreciated the comment; ...

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 ...

Only last year, Thomas Friedman, three-times Pulitzer Prize winner and a regular columnist in the New York Times, wrote: ‘One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a ...

Sometime during the 1970s the witch was transformed from a black-hatted crone to a wise medicine women. The spell was cast by radical feminist historians, determined to find their own heroic ...

Literature, it goes without saying, has many more tricks up its sleeve than rhyme, metre and the dramatic unities. Take the Book of Lamentations. Four of its five chapters are alphabetic acrostics, ...

I never met Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, and before reading this excellent biography I never really understood what she had suffered or achieved. Nonetheless, at various times her ...

The story that apparently inspired Barclay Price to write this book is of a Chinese man called William Macao who arrived in Britain in or around 1775 as a servant. Thanks to benign employers, he was ...

Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and ...