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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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).

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 ...

Asked to name the greatest American poet, Robert Lowell once replied ‘Milton’. The joke had a point to it. Contemporary English poets in the mainstream admire poets like Marvell or Robert Graves who ...

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.

Born in Dublin, Iris Murdoch was brought up in England and took a degree in classics at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1942. After two years as an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, she worked for a ...

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

Perhaps the most revealing Roy Cohn anecdote in this extraordinary book concerns the time, in 1955, when the infamous lawyer took Barbara Walters out on a first date. Cohn picked up the TV star in his ...

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 ...

True Believers - Sunrise by Téa Obreht ...