Gate of Lilacs is, in Clive James’s words, a ‘quinzaine of rhapsodies’: a poem of fifteen parts in blank verse that is also a critical essay on Proust. ‘His book,’ says James, ‘big for a book, is ...

Ian Kershaw enters a crowded field with To Hell and Back, the first instalment of a two-volume history of Europe’s horrendous 20th century. Anyone interested in the period already has a formidable ...

When I was young, England was a much odder country than it seems today, and every now and then – much to the delight of its inhabitants – its oddity was celebrated in print by some fond but puzzled ...

Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson ...

‘This is the story of two middle-class families’, a prefatory note to All Our Yesterdays tells us; two families, it goes on, that suffer the ‘impact of Mussolini’s fascism’. It is also a ‘simple story ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

Brutal killings in London’s East End provide both the curtain raiser and final act for Judith Flanders’s insightful and dramatic staging of the story of Victorian Britain’s love–hate relationship with ...

There is, plainly, no logic in the unfolding of time.’ Pankaj Mishra makes this sceptical observation in order to undermine the theories of history that have inspired Western thinkers and leaders over ...

Simon J V Malloch: First among Equals - Augustus: The Biography by Jochen Bleicken (Translated by Anthea Bell) ...

Fairy tales are a curious genre of literature. Their origins float around in an unfathomable past ravelled up in one another like the tangled roots of water vegetation. Their contents are equally ...

Cleaner, babysitter and general dogsbody Agnès Morel has been a fixture in the cathedral town of Chartres for twenty years. Surrounded by gossipy old mesdames, priests who doubt their vocation and an ...