Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

Towards the end of of The Folks That Live On The Hill, Kingsley Amis describes an old devil's difficulties with novels. Freddie finds it hard to concentrate. One immediately feels a certain sympathy.

The Western Wind is set in 1491, in the kind of peripheral, unspectacular place in which, we book lovers know, the best stories are often found. Oakham (not the one in Rutland, it seems) is a ...

Although we are told that the average attention span is reduced to a matter of seconds, literary life continues to favour the marathon runner at the expense of the sprinter. No one in his right mind ...

THE CLOSED CIRCLE is the sequel to Jonathan Coe's comedy The Rotters' Club. We have left the 1970s behind and moved on twenty-five years from Heath's to Blair's Britain. You don't need to read the ...

In the opening pages of this book, the first volume in a monumental new history of Britain’s experience of the ‘long’ Second World War (the second volume will cover the period 1942–7, ending with ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...

‘Like that black president, you’d think … you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do,’ says Me, the disingenuous black narrator of Paul Beatty’s latest, Booker-shortlisted novel ...

This book begins with a real event that took place on rue des Ecoles in Paris on 25 February 1980 at around half past three in the afternoon. After a good lunch, the distinguished philosopher and ...

The mystery of Agatha Christie's extraordinary appeal is the subject for investigation in this engaging study by Robert Barnard, and by the end of the book you should be a lot clearer about the ...

Even today, in a world where literary culture can seem as fragmented and diffuse as leaves strewn across an autumnal lawn, pundits still talk animatedly about ‘the literary establishment’. Twenty ...