North London is a more modish breeding ground for novelists than Notting Hill ever was – spawning among others Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Will Self. Nicola Barker, who sets Small Holdings here on ...

‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out ...

The central tension in this refreshingly contrarian book becomes apparent near the start. Discussing Woodrow Wilson’s dictum ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’, pronounced in 1917, Reynolds ...

Paul Cartledge: Delenda Est Carthago - Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization by Richard Miles ...

‘Dornford Yates’ was the pen-name of novelist William Mercer, 1885–1960. Of all the authors whose fiction has got about my wits, none has tempted me so clamorously to find out about his factual life.

Felicity Cloake: Food, Inglorious Food - Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Food is Wrong by Tim Spector ...

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 ...

David Gelber: Heroic Work in a Very Important Field - Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times by Phillipa K Chong ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

Defending Philip Larkin from his critics, Christopher Hitchens said that readers loved him because he understood everyday suffering. He mapped ‘decaying communities, old people’s homes, housing ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘ Pedicabo et irrumabo vos ’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘ pedicabo et irrumabo vos ’ is how it stays ...