The most reticent and troubled member of the so-called New York School of Poets, James Schuyler (1923–91) gave his first ...

In Those Who Are About to Die, Harry Sidebottom recounts a story told by St Augustine of a pupil who detested the games but ...

The epigraph, taken from William Cowper, to Part Four of Jonathan Coe’s engrossing, labyrinthine Number 11 is crucial to understanding where Coe is now as a writer. It refers to one of the book’s ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

Readers will be familiar with Gloucester Crescent, that handsome terrace of Victorian villas in Camden Town. It has been much satirised since the 1960s, when it was rescued from decay thanks to an ...

The dust jacket of Juliet Gardiner’s huge, scholarly and readable history of the years between the Slump and the Second World War bears the legend, ‘Britain’s Forgotten Decade’. In fact, as she well ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

Few, I suspect, will instantly recall that 2025 marks four hundred years since the death of James VI and I. He had the ...

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, has not been idle since leaving government. Talking to Terrorists is his third book in six years, following on the heels of a volume on Machiavelli ...

About Time - Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein by Diana Kormos Buchwald & Michael D Gordin ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

Off the Rails is not the definitive history of HS2, but Gimson has clearly set out the sequence of decisions that have ...