Drudge Culture - Small Holdings by Nicola Barker ...

David Gelber: Heroic Work in a Very Important Field - Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times by Phillipa K Chong ...

Jeremy Lewis: Those Inky Scoundrels - More Matter: Essays and Criticism by John Updike ...

'GRIM IS THE lot of the Russian poet: / an inscrutable fate / leads Pushkin to the pistol's barrel, / Dostoevsky to the scaffold', wrote the poet and magus Max Voloshin in 1922 after he witnessed the ...

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...

‘What is to be done about pornography?’ ask two of the contributors to Catherine Itzin’s bulky, 650-page collection of essays. What indeed? Itzin aims to provide us with a ‘comprehensive and ...

The purported motive for Alexander Lee’s spasmodically impressive and frequently pantomimic Ugly Renaissance is his conviction that historians and tour guides are serving up an idealised Apollonian ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

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 ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of ...

This is a strange book, written with considerable charm and plenty of gorgeous detail, but difficult in many ways to get a handle on. The life referred to in the title is not Philip Hensher’s own, but ...