Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

‘My books are simply autobiographies,’ Mark Twain once confessed. True of most American writers, it seems especially true of a man who, as Ron Powers argues in this magisterial biography, ‘found a ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

‘I merely attend to the progress of my Life of Johnson’, wrote James Boswell in his journal on the eve of his fiftieth birthday in 1790. Every biographer knows that feeling: when you are in the middle ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

The mystery of Agatha Christie's extraordinary appeal is the subject for investigation in this engaging study by Robert Barnard, and by the end of the book you should be a lot clearer about the ...

When W T Stead drowned on the Titanic, Lord Northcliffe paid tribute to the ‘great revolution which he effected in journalism’. If Northcliffe – founder of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror – ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

Jacqueline Rose is a formidable scholar who has applied her deep practical understanding of psychoanalysis to explorations of English literature, and she now turns that understanding on Zionism. She ...

The Ship of Fools is never short of passengers or crew. In David Pryce-Jones’s brisk new polemic, he sketches a pageant of British men and women who regularly had a good word for dictators, left and ...

THE CLOSED CIRCLE is the sequel to Jonathan Coe's comedy The Rotters' Club. We have left the 1970s behind and moved on twenty-five years from Heath's to Blair's Britain. You don't need to read the ...

The usual perception of Richard Burton is that he wasted his talent. As legend has it, he was a Shakespearean actor who sold out to the movies and was prepared to act in any old rubbish for the money, ...