The year 1918 was an extraordinary historical moment. As the Great War roared to an end after four long years of blood and horror, it appeared briefly that the future of the world lay wide open. The ...

Although his literary works are by no means uniformly successful, Peter Ackroyd may safely be described as an author possessed of genius, and had he died before attaining middle age (like Bruce ...

There have been innumerable books written on Vermeer since Tracy Chevalier’s bestselling historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, first published in 1999, inspired a trend. Laura Snyder’s new ...

A popular riposte to the idea of evolution is the so-called ‘argument from design’. The discovery of a pocket watch on a hillside leads naturally to the inference of the existence of a watchmaker. The ...

AMONG ALL THE Hollywood writers originating from this side of the Atlantic, Gavin Lambert has long seemed to me to be the best. Of his many heirs, perhaps only Dominick Dunne has an equally expert 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 ...

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Who was Charles de Gaulle? Stop the clock in 1939 and he was an eccentric army officer. Stop it in July 1940, after he had flown to London, and he was claiming to represent France against the Vichy ...

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 ...

Book Reviews by subject: Literature and Literary Criticism & 21st Century December 2021 Issue Martha Rampton Wave Formations Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1950–2020 ...