AFTER ANITA BROOKNER'S brief experiment with an elderly man as the main character in last year's novel, The Next Big Thing, her trademark women are back at the centre here - and back with a vengeance.

In the summer of 1940, Britain was staring down the barrel of a gun. Defeated by the Germany Army on land and besieged by U-boats at sea, the nation was forced to rely on its last defence against ...

IT IS 2020 and only two years since the dollar was cancelled. Anna Moore, Inland Revenue Inspector (A2 Grade), must investigate John Law, quadrillionaire inventor of Soft Gold, the first electronic ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

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 ...

Every 9 November during the Third Reich, Hitler and his minions performed a solemn memorial rite for comrades killed during the struggle for power. The day that properly commemorated the dead of the ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

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 ...

The late fourteenth century was an age of popular rebellion. The Black Death of 1348 opened a long period of economic wretchedness, characterised by epidemic disease, depopulation and deflationary ...

In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors. Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest ...

SALLEY VICKERS IS an audacious writer. who dares to tread where few in this apostate age would wish to venture. At a time when the Church of England is struggling to persuade its dwindling ...