The epigraph, taken from William Cowper, to Part Four of Jonathan Coe’s engrossing, labyrinthine Number 11 is crucial to understanding where Coe is now as a writer. It refers to one of the book’s ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

Readers will be familiar with Gloucester Crescent, that handsome terrace of Victorian villas in Camden Town. It has been much satirised since the 1960s, when it was rescued from decay thanks to an ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

The dust jacket of Juliet Gardiner’s huge, scholarly and readable history of the years between the Slump and the Second World War bears the legend, ‘Britain’s Forgotten Decade’. In fact, as she well ...

Sometime during the 1970s the witch was transformed from a black-hatted crone to a wise medicine women. The spell was cast by radical feminist historians, determined to find their own heroic ...

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, has not been idle since leaving government. Talking to Terrorists is his third book in six years, following on the heels of a volume on Machiavelli ...

It is a brave, some might say foolish writer who embarks on a history of the English Civil War these days. The grand historical narratives of the war that raged from 1642 to 1649, written by the likes ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship, with a thoughtful introduction by Alan Powers, accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (27 May–17 September 2017), ...

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

The Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s seventh short-story collection, Autocorrect, presents a world of Zoom calls, dating apps, selfie sticks, AI chatbots and reality shows, while also touching on the ...