North London is a more modish breeding ground for novelists than Notting Hill ever was – spawning among others Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Will Self. Nicola Barker, who sets Small Holdings here on ...

David Gelber: Heroic Work in a Very Important Field - Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times by Phillipa K Chong ...

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 ...

Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

Defending Philip Larkin from his critics, Christopher Hitchens said that readers loved him because he understood everyday suffering. He mapped ‘decaying communities, old people’s homes, housing ...

American women have been authors for more than three hundred and fifty years. Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers is quite astonishingly the first comprehensive history of these writers. Showalter ...

The Imagist poet T E Hulme described Romanticism as ‘spilt religion’, and his quip continues to resonate today. Elevating them to a standing once accorded only to the Deity, the Romantic belief that ...

Nick Cohen: The Haves and the Have-Some-Mores - The New Few, or A Very British Oligarchy: Power and Inequality in Britain Now by Ferdinand Mount ...

February is the month when the Public Lending Right computers eventually produce the sums they have been mulling over since June. The result is that 17,594 registered authors share between them the ...

Chainless souls are a bit like stray dogs; you feel sympathy for them in theory but you don’t really want to be landed with them for very long. Katherine Frank’s A Chainless Soul, the first biography ...

Philip Larkin, who hated artistic modernism with a passion that bordered on (or sometimes crossed the border into) rage, blamed the whole ghastly mess on the three Ps: Ezra Pound, Charlie Parker and ...

In early 1942 the German war machine was engaged in a deadly race against the Allies to build the world’s first atomic bomb. Central to this effort was the remote experimental plant at Vemork in ...