‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I went to a party in Tina Brown’s rooms in Bloomsbury, and was introduced to Alexander Chancellor. I was then working for the New Statesman, correctly recollected in this ...

It’s not an admission that reflects all that well on me, but every now and then, as I read through this excellent and revelatory volume of posthumously published Kafka stories, I found myself thinking ...

One of the more curious effluents of our current ecological crisis is the novel of environmental degradation, and specifically of deforestation. Such works – 2016’s Barkskins, by the Pulitzer Prize ...

Chloe Hooper’s debut, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002. It was about a young teacher who – while pursuing an affair with a pupil’s father – becomes obsessed ...

Since, so far as I can tell, all 5 million of the Literary Review’s readers – with the sole exception of myself – are writing/have written at least one book, they will know what I mean by ‘the myths ...

This is an interesting, informative and wrong-headed book, at its best when the author ignores her own theoretical assunlptionsand gives us straight forward literary history. The problem with Julia ...

The public apparition known as ‘Sir Roy Strong’ has been created partly by himself (his insistence on wearing those funny hats and drawling his exaggerated likes and dislikes on television) and partly ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

Maligned, misconstrued and I suspect, little read, the Marquis de Sade remains not only one of the great moralists of the eighteenth century, but also the prototypical exponent of sexual psychology.

Born at the very start of the 20th century, Roland Penrose lived a long, busy, productive and useful life in the arts, and has a fair claim to be considered a minor but valuable national treasure – ...

Marc Morris is an up-and-coming historian, with a biography of Edward I and an influential volume on castles already under his belt. Here he attempts an ambitious overview of the Norman conquest from ...