It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

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 ...

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 ...

‘Populists are rebelling not only against a specific (liberal) type of politics but also against the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy,’ write Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

James Watson, co-discoverer of the secret of life, tries hard before selecting a final title for his books. The story of his and Francis Crick’s race for the double helix of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The old-style publisher’s memoir, which reached its high-water mark between about 1920 and 1950, was a relatively staid affair. The publisher who wrote it – say, Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, author ...

Biographers of T S Eliot face a number of challenges, not least the marked disinclination of their subject to having his biography written at all. When, in the early 1960s, a scholar wrote an account ...