I attended a workshop in Fulda, a city right in the middle of Germany. To medievalists, it is best known as the resting place ...

There is a fashion for leaving central characters and narrators nameless, presenting reviewers with a headache. It is hard to avoid clunky, repetitive periphrasis (“the narrator”, “the student”, “the ...

that seem to stretch all sense of reason: ...

Alice Chadwick’s impressive debut novel unfolds within a twenty-four-hour period in a nameless small town in 1980s England. Teenagers, out on a hot summer evening, wander between the weir, a party, ...

Catherine Swire’s sister, Flora, was killed, aged twenty-three, in the bomb that exploded Pan Am Flight 103 above Lockerbie, southwest Scotland, in 1988. Swire’s parents have spoken publicly about ...

“Rather melancholy” was Barbara Pym’s initial judgement on Pimlico. Pym-lico, we should say, of course: with her sister, Hilary, the novelist lived in this part of London for four postwar years; and ...

Daniel Butt (Letters, February 21) concedes one of my main points in his response to my earlier letter. He admits that it was right for West Germany to pay reparations for Nazi crimes, even though the ...

Samuel Eusebius Hudson tells us that he wrote too much, but that it was impossible for him to “allay the itch of scribbling”. A settler in the Cape in the early British period, which in 1795 followed ...

Towards the end of this brief, eclectic book, James C. Scott quotes disapprovingly the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky’s ...

It's not only on the President of the USA that questions have landed about the accuracy of his public statements (whether ...

According to one outline narrative of British literary history, lyric had displaced epic as the dominant poetic genre by the early nineteenth century. Out with “Man’s First Disobedience”, “Arms, and ...