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

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 ...

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 ...

The opening sequence of Kev Lambert’s May Our Joy Endure signals the novel’s intent. Lambert devotes whole pages of prose to the sights, sounds and smells, and the inner lives of guests, at a decadent ...

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 ...

Michael Caines interviews the men behind the Royal Shakespeare Company's thrilling new production of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II; and ...