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 ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

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 ...

Maurice Bowra does not seem to have survived his death. There can be few people now under the age of sixty who remember him. For the rest of us, his reputation as the most famous Oxford don of his era ...

‘What do you do for books?’ This is almost the first anguished cry from father to daughter recorded in these pages, and soon she was putting the same question to him. The persistence of the inquiry ...

LUCKY THE SCHOLAR who discovers a hitherto unstudied subject. Nathalie Blondel has staked out an academic corner with an obscure (otherwise described as 'unjustly neglected') British writer called ...

Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

The Gentry is a depressing title for a book, which conjures up uncharitable images. It makes me think of a hangdog Etonian, stubborn, aloof, courteous, risk-averse and mean with his money; a tall, ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

With this book, Jackie Wullschlager links hands with John Richardson, Hilary Spurling and Alex Danchev, all of whom, in their respective biographies of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, have made the early ...

In her latest book, which tells the stories of three generations of women, and the men who love them, Penelope Lively presents us with a wholesome vision of England. It begins in 1935, when a ...

First, a confession. Ali Smith has been a heroine of mine since she eschewed professional theatre companies and chose instead a bunch of schoolchildren to adapt her novel Hotel World for the stage.