London’s architecture has become laughably boorish, confidently uncouth and flashily arid. Neomodern bling and meretricious trash are the current norms. Without exception, big-name architects turn out ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

It took liberals just two decades to turn from hubris to hand-wringing. When the Berlin Wall fell, their confidence was unbounded. The ‘End of History’ was declared. Liberalism had won. Today, with ...

Returning to England from Belfast, where I taught for a time, I frequently footstepped the Quantock Hills in Somerset, from Wills Neck to West Quantoxhead, following the stream in Holford Combe before ...

Anglo-Saxon London suffers from an image problem, or more precisely from the problem that we have no image of it at all. In contrast to the showy glamour of Roman Britain, with its amphitheatres, ...

Since, so far as I can tell, all 5 million of the Literary Review’s readers – with the sole exception of myself – are writing/have written at least one book, they will know what I mean by ‘the myths ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Perfectly timed for the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic narrative of the Hundred Years’ War takes the story from Richard II’s death in 1399 ...

Publishers are tremendous copycats; and ineffectual copycats at that. Someone scores a hit with Watership Down and, for a few years, you can't get near the children's bookshop without wading through ...

In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring. @foxtosser ...

Marguerite Duras’s bitterly gentle prose has a seductive and impressive immediacy. Her sardonic and incisive style resembles that of Katherine Mansfield, and they share the same quality of atmospheric ...

Nicholas Shakespeare’s first novel since 2010 is a literary thriller set in a damp, wintry Oxford. The book’s protagonist will be familiar to Shakespeare’s regular readers: John Dyer appeared in his ...