This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

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In his long and distinguished career as a novelist Graham Greene has often flirted with the simple adventure story (‘There is a great deal of Boys’ Own Paper in Greene,’ V S Pritchett once told me).

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

Given the notorious reluctance of ghosts to appear before impartial observers, anyone attempting to trace the history of the supernatural faces peculiar difficulties. Books on this subject usually ...

This is not a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It is the book. Previous studies, above all the monumental and patient work of Michael Scammell, 'will give you all the facts' – as biographies do in ...

IN HIS THIRTY-FIVE years of life, Paul Nizan was a key intellectual in the French Communist Party. He published three novels, polemical essays, translations and a large quantity of militant journalism ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

John Adamson: 1688 and All That - The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada by Arthur der Weduwen ...

What happened to the British working class? E P Thompson dated its ‘making’ to the early 19th century and wrote: ‘working class presence was, in 1832, the most significant factor in British political ...

Perhaps the most revealing Roy Cohn anecdote in this extraordinary book concerns the time, in 1955, when the infamous lawyer took Barbara Walters out on a first date. Cohn picked up the TV star in his ...