We are saddened to hear of the death of Edmund White. We've lifted the paywall on Richard Davenport-Hines's 2014 review of White's Paris memoir. Richard Davenport-Hines - Scenes from a Literary Life ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

Early on in what is, I hope, the first instalment of his autobiography, Frederic Raphael describes how, as a schoolboy at Charterhouse, he disqualified himself from sitting for a closed scholarship to ...

Any book with the title The Bell of Treason should be a warning to us that we are about to read a morality tale. While ‘Munich’ – the Munich conference of 1938 – has long been a byword for appeasement ...

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...

The American poet Anthony Hecht (1923–2004) is an unfashionable figure. His work is celebrated for its mastery of traditional form and its dedication to the high style, in common with the work of ...

The Italian Renaissance has been exercising its magnetic power over tourists, scholars, composers, playwrights, artists and novelists since its beginning. Indeed, there is now held to have been a ...

Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and ...

Max Adams tells his readers very early on that ‘the real Dark Age in British history can be found in Book I of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History’. It is this lacuna, the period between 580 and 710, that ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Uncertain Glory focuses on the most significant period in Catalonia’s 20th-century history, the Spanish Civil War. The novel describes the journey of four young people, from ‘the uncertain glory of an ...

Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid ...