Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

In his superb American Pastoral, Philip Roth displayed signs of wanting to examine his kind of people in greater philosophic depth: Swede Lermontov, a Newark Jew who has moved to the mink-and-manure ...

‘Nothing is implied in this publication about any person, living or dead, which is not herein explicitly stated.' Thus runs the caveat inside the front cover of this sustained politico-religious ...

Samuel Beckett began Our Exagmination Round his Factification For Incarnation Of Work In Progress, the first ever collection of essays on Finnegans Wake, with the memorable remark that: ‘The danger ...

Jacobsen’s hypothetical scenario centres on a genetically modified strain of plague, one of history’s most devastating ...

Josip Strossmayer was a Croatian bishop and Pius IX’s most turbulent priest at the Vatican Council of 1869–70 (‘Vatican I’), passionately opposed to the dogma of infallibility for which the Pope was ...

California Dreaming - The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill ...

A Bulbous Moon - The Poems of Sylvia Plath by Amanda Golden & Karen V Kukil (eds) ...

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 ...

‘In the museum at The Hague, a superb and very singular landscape arrests all visitors and vividly impresses artists and connoisseurs.’ The radical journalist and art critic Théophile Thoré, writing ...

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 ...