Robert Harris’s new historical-fictional foray delves into the early career and meteoric rise of Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose surname derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’, as he entertainingly tells ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

To Guardian readers, the premise of State of the Nation will come as no surprise. A history of British theatre since the war, it makes no mention of theatre in its main title, following Michael ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

Madness is deep-rooted in the human imagination. The mad are unreachable, unfathomable, alarmingly other. They unsettle us. Yet we also romanticise madness. Great poetry and art spring from ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

he King Arthur of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, written between 1856 and 1885, is the King Arthur of Malory and the French romance tradition before him: Lancelot and Guinevere, Mordred and Merlin, ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

Joyce’s later fiction is now, alas, widely tolerated in English Departments and the general reader of an uncut Ulysses is unlikely to be prosecuted, even, now, yet. Colin MacCabe's long-advertised ...

THE SPANISH CONQUEST of the Indies was one of the most important events in history, leaving an ineffaceable impression on global politics, language and culture. Yet among English speakers it is a ...

Countless newlyweds in the 1960s, suddenly facing a need to cook for the first time in their lives, turned with relief to The Constance Spry Cookery Book as their kitchen bible. The 1956 bestseller ...

WORDSWORTH DESCRIBED CHARLES Lamb and his older sister Mary as 'a double tree / with two collateral stems sprung from one root'. They were the most intimate of companions, apparently inseparable. 'As, ...