Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

‘Characters migrate.’ New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip takes this aphorism from Umberto Eco as its epigraph and it has multiple resonances in his novel. The thirteen-year-old narrator Matilda’s ...

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 ...

Thom Gunn started out as a member of the Movement, that 1950s collection of like-minded British poets, but he looks now like a consistent outsider. When he left England and went to America, he ...

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 ...

It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...

Vladimir Nabokov was famously no fan of literary biography, dismissing it as so much ‘psycho-plagiarism’. It was therefore inconsistent as well as rash of him to agree, in 1968, to countenance just ...

Jan Morris, at the start of her tenth decade, has written a 188-day ‘thought diary’, ‘having for the moment nothing much else to write’. It is a splendidly quirky confection that mixes the trivial ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...

Of all the many and wretched women processed through these pages, the luckiest is surely Mildred Martin, who supervised Roth in ‘independent reading’ at Bucknell University. She admired him and has ...

In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...