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 ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

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 ...

True Believers - Sunrise by Téa Obreht ...

In Arabia Jonathan Raban suggested that if the Arabs were to acquire a genuine contemporary literature, it would be written by women ‘because women were the only people living under the kind of strain ...

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 ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

Kazuo Ishiguro has been widely praised for his ‘Japanese’ virtues as a writer: delicacy, subtlety, quiet irony, watercolour tones, etc. The fact that he was born in Japan and set his first two novels ...

John Adamson: 1688 and All That - The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada by Arthur der Weduwen ...

All the Write Stuff - A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher ...

In 2014 he wrote Napoleon the Great, which made the case for bracketing his subject with Alexander, Peter and Frederick. That was a full biography which portrayed Napoleon in action, both on the ...