The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of ...

Chainless souls are a bit like stray dogs; you feel sympathy for them in theory but you don’t really want to be landed with them for very long. Katherine Frank’s A Chainless Soul, the first biography ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

George Saunders’s six short stories and one novella take the reader on a bizarre odyssey into the dark reaches of the author’s febrile imagination, a world turned upside down and populated by weirdos ...

Even as the ink was drying on the Versailles Treaty in 1919, foreigners began to return to the Germany they had so loved: the country of Goethe and Schiller, of picturesque villages and romantic ...

Like most good writers Jeremy Lewis enjoyed the art of embellishment. He once described finding the snapped-off head of a toothbrush inside a pork pie in a pub outside Dublin. Do you think that ...

We all know the true story of how Father Christmas came to be. It was the work of Siberian shamans high on ...

For most people the ballad possesses an aura of quaintness, of temporal and social remoteness that invites either patronising academic dissection or folksy sentimentality. This aura Alan Bold aims to ...

For both Russia and the West, Dmitri Shostakovich was the great Soviet composer. Born a year after the 1905 revolution, professionally trained after the Bolshevik takeover, he was the recipient of ...

A surprising number of young would-be reviewers chose to write about adult books, and all of them seemed at pains to imitate an adult style of reviewing, not realising that authentic grandness of ...

This collection of poetry, prose and political dialectic is directed against the Western idea of childhood. What most of us regard as an early stage in life is represented here as a synthetic creation ...