There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

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 ...

Two things should be said at the start about James Hamilton-Paterson. First, he has spent much of his life shunning the UK. In a rare profile in The Guardian fourteen years ago, he spoke of leaving ...

The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of ...

This generous collection of 154 pieces of what Brian Boyd in the introduction calls Nabokov’s ‘public prose’ – mostly uncollected and sometimes also unpublished journalism – is presented ...

Perhaps there once was a time when you could happily wet the bed, play with your faeces or your sister, barge into your parents bedroom without knocking and still grow up to be a relatively ...

The Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

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 ...

Dostoevsky criticism has, over the last century, become a branch of theology at times, and some of the best introductions to Dostoevsky’s fiction have been written by ordained clerics, such as ...

Andrew Greig’s version of a Scottish Border song ‘The Ballad of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea’ is a tense, atmospheric study of a political powder keg and the love triangle that threatens to ignite it.

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 ...