Out of their cupboards they come tumbling, the skeletons thrust there in haste, or tucked neatly in, locked away by several or furtively concealed by one. William Trevor has brought out a new book and ...

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 ...

It is hard to change our minds, notes Julian Barnes, who has changed his on several occasions. After a lifetime of thinking Georges Simenon and E M Forster overrated as novelists, he now admires them.

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

The paradox at the centre of High Fidelity is that while pop songs almost always involve love, passion and raw feeling, the kind of men who are most intensely addicted to pop music tend to be a bunch ...

‘There’s a fine line between fiction and non-fiction,’ Kinky Friedman once wrote, ‘and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979.’ The wry protagonist of Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel, The Illogic of ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

When Daniel Farson became a television interviewer in 1956, the critics were inclined to accuse him of brutality: MR FARSON PULLS NO PUNCHES, as one newspaper headline put it mildly. In fact, the ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...