In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

Gate of Lilacs is, in Clive James’s words, a ‘quinzaine of rhapsodies’: a poem of fifteen parts in blank verse that is also a critical essay on Proust. ‘His book,’ says James, ‘big for a book, is ...

Many of Dirk Bogarde's best performances on screen involved the use of significant pauses: the enigmatic look on his face as he regards the sleeping James Fox in the first scene of Joseph Losey's The ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

The Western Wind is set in 1491, in the kind of peripheral, unspectacular place in which, we book lovers know, the best stories are often found. Oakham (not the one in Rutland, it seems) is a ...

THREE OF THE finest English historians working today are Jonathan Clark, Maurice Cowling and Edward Norman. All are prolific, serious, important scholars of, respectively, the eighteenth-century ...

Towards the end of of The Folks That Live On The Hill, Kingsley Amis describes an old devil's difficulties with novels. Freddie finds it hard to concentrate. One immediately feels a certain sympathy.

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 ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...

The past and the operation of memory are recurring themes in Penelope Lively’s work, and her latest book also finds her looking back, this time at her own past. She is, however, more interested in ...