John Carey is a very big wheel in the world of Eng Lit, and its Oxford branch in particular. After taking a first at St John’s, he taught at a number of colleges before being made the Merton Professor ...

Back in the early 1980s, in the depths of an Oxford winter, I remember trudging through the snow to attend something called the New College Fiction Symposium – a kind of brains trust featuring ...

WHEN ARTHUR BRYANT presented the sanitised version of Lord Alanbrooke's diaries in the 1950s, he called the volume that culminated with El Alamein 'The Turn of the Tide'. Winston Churchill, in an ...

In this difficult-to-classify book, Ian Sansom – best known for his mystery novels, which I’ve read and enjoyed – rambles through (or beside) one of the great modern poems: ‘September 1, 1939’ by W H ...

When I first came to west Cornwall in the 1960s Barbara Hepworth’s small, dark, intense figure seemed as much part of the landscape of St Ives as the sculptures she made to adorn it. Her decision to ...