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 ...

Warren Farrell has set out to write a very brave book, one which feminists have been waiting for for many years. It would be the sort of land mark text The Female Eunuch or The Feminine Mystique was ...

Julian Bell’s Mirror of the World naturally invites comparison with E H Gombrich’s The Story of Art, now in its sixteenth edition and reprinted every year but one since it was first published by ...

F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are two of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Among the remarkable things about them are the peculiar similarities and parallels of their ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

Born in Dublin, Iris Murdoch was brought up in England and took a degree in classics at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1942. After two years as an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, she worked for a ...

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 ...

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 ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

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 ...

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 ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín’s third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...