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 ...

‘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 ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

'SKINNY D'AMATO'- THE nickname followed by the Italian surname - sounds like a Mob guy. Yet almost every American male in the first half of the twentieth century had a nickname; and there were plenty ...

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 ...

Two things should be said at the start about James Hamilton-Paterson. First, he has spent much of his life shunning the UK. In a rare profile in The Guardian fourteen years ago, he spoke of leaving ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 – ...

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 ...

These are the words I wrote down in my little blue book when I first read 50 Reasons to Hate the French in proof back in July of this year: As a congenital Francophile, weaned from my cradle on the ...