HE WAS AN odd fellow, J L Carr. I first met hm in 1988 at a writers' conference at York University. Despite the fact that he was a celebrated novelist who had been twice shortlisted for the Booker ...

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 ...

I am tired of people telling me that penises aren't interesting, because they are; and, though I'm no Freudian analyst, I strongly suspect that these ignorant folk are trying to conceal a ...

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 ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s captivating autobiographical novels may have been written for children, but they have become primers for mid-19th-century pioneer American history and the hard-won creation myth ...

This book can be read in three ways. First, it is a work of considerable scholarship and the fruit of much archival probing by a fine scholar of early Bolshevism – and much of it is fresh, exciting ...

The Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

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 ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...