Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily ...

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 ...

In ‘Burnt Norton’, T S Eliot tells us that 'human kind / Cannot bear very much reality'. You could say the same thing about eighteenth-century verse with more justice. The Augustans could bear much ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

He was born in Paddington station, became tutor to Einstein, honorary valet to the Duke of Edinburgh, and President of Ireland. He was had up for smuggling and was a musical genius. He was born in ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

Ulrikka S Gernes’s debut novel, A Girl Left the Room, was published to huge acclaim in Denmark in 2024. It begins with a moth trapped in a train carriage. The protagonist, Tanja, captures it tenderly ...

‘Publishing was ruined. Amazon, Germans, the end of antitrust laws, printing in China, take your pick.’ So laments Eddie Triplett, whose reappearance in the life of his former stepdaughter propels the ...

For many years Günther Grass resisted: The Tin Drum was not to be turned into a film. And, one would have thought, his reluctance to see the novel adapted for the screen was perfectly understandable – ...