Returning to England from Belfast, where I taught for a time, I frequently footstepped the Quantock Hills in Somerset, from Wills Neck to West Quantoxhead, following the stream in Holford Combe before ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

Anglophone gay male fiction has entered an uncannily quiet period. No longer the darling of the big publishing houses, especially when compared to lesbian- and trans-related fiction, it sometimes ...

JOHN CAMPBELL CONCLUDES his monumental biography of twentieth-century Britain's greatest peacetime prime minister with the Latin tag: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Margaret Thatcher's eleven ...

The story surrounding the composition and publication of Crown Jewel affords an interesting example of changing literary taste in the last half century. Its author, a Trinidadian of French Creole ...

Europe is a culture with an ancient wound, a fault line which has divided it since the sixteenth-century Reformation. The division between Catholic and Protestant Europe still runs deep even where ...

Recently I interviewed Tristan Garcia, one of France’s most vaunted young novelists, and mentioned that I’d been teaching Michel Tournier’s The Erl-King. His eyes took on sudden light and we spent the ...

Johnsey Cunliffe is a young Tipperary man with a disability that has rendered him somewhat lumbering and, in everyone’s estimation (including his own), simple. Despite this, the third-person narrative ...

The main thesis of this well-written, robust, sympathetic study of Hazlitt and his age is that he was a man both representative of and seriously at odds with the prevailing literary, political and ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...