‘Always historicise!’ With this resounding imperative, Fredric Jameson opens his third major work of Marxist literary theory, of which the precursors were Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

This is the first book devoted to the history of the British country house library. Mark Purcell was the libraries curator at the National Trust from 1999 to 2015, and his text is naturally arranged ...

Richard Gott’s Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt is a comprehensive and passionate denunciation of the militaristic side of imperial life. Gott narrowly focuses on a period in which ...

THE JEROME SISTERS were the first wave of American beauties to marry into the British aristocracy, the precursors of a tide of 'Dollar Princesses' eager to swap cash for titles. Unlike their ...

Among the many reasons I am grateful for the unabashedly Anglican prep-school education I received some half a century ago, an introduction to the tradition of English church music is high on the list ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...

Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...

In his long and distinguished career as a novelist Graham Greene has often flirted with the simple adventure story (‘There is a great deal of Boys’ Own Paper in Greene,’ V S Pritchett once told me).

Neel Mukherjee’s third novel is made up of five narratives and the book’s architecture is revealed gradually: the odd-numbered sections are linked to each other, as are the even-numbered ones. Any ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...