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 ...

For much of the last decade Muslim diaspora communities in Europe have been the subject of intense scrutiny. A spectrum of views has sprung up to explain away their seeming unwillingness, or inability ...

Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

Best-selling author Robert Lacey begins his fascinating history with Cheddar Man, who lived 9,000 years ago when England was still joined to Europe. He ends with the discovery of DNA and thus creates ...

No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, ...

Anglophone gay male fiction has entered an uncannily quiet period. No longer the darling of the big publishing houses, especially when compared to lesbian- and trans-related fiction, it sometimes ...

In ‘Burnt Norton’, T S Eliot tells us that 'human kind / Cannot bear very much reality'. You could say the same thing about eighteenth-century verse with more justice. The Augustans could bear much ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

‘I hope these disparate pieces add up to something’, writes Martin Amis with uncharacteristic diffidence in his introduction to this collection of occasional journalism ‘offered with all generic ...

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 ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

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 ...