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 ...

The fifties was the great decade of radio soap-opera. I myself am always very mindful of this aspect of the period since my own godmother devised and was the principal coordinating scriptwriter of Mrs ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

There may be hope for civilisation after all if a dictionary can rise – as this one has done – to the commanding heights of the non-fiction best sellers’ list. The popularity of Collins Dictionary of ...

It is fourteen years since Dominic Sandbrook published Never Had It So Good, the first part of what was intended to be a three-volume history of postwar Britain. That nine-hundred pager, covering the ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would ...

Inverting the old cliché, Christopher Hitchens said, ‘Everyone has a book in them and that, in most cases, is where it should stay.’ The journalist and satirist Karl Kraus agreed: journalists, ...

The Spanish Empire was an improbable creation. Relatively poor, meagrely populated and only recently integrated, Spain nonetheless built the largest realm the world had seen. From a landlocked capital ...

Bioarchaeologist Aarathi Prasad’s latest book is about one of the most extraordinary natural phenomena ever to have been exploited by man. Soft yet strong, delicate yet robust, the protein filaments ...

Has it ever occurred to you that the last millennium and a half of Western civilisation could have easily been pagan? Or Manichaean? Or Muslim? Or that, even if it were Christian, it could have ...

In a late poem about a friend’s death, Czesław Miłosz writes of the long passage between youth and age as one of learning ‘how to bear what is borne by others’. It could be a summary of his own poetic ...