In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Asked to name the greatest American poet, Robert Lowell once replied ‘Milton’. The joke had a point to it. Contemporary English poets in the mainstream admire poets like Marvell or Robert Graves who ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

As the title of his memoir made clear, James did indeed live his life in and through institutions. He was not unique in that ...

This is partly because Chabal – a historian of France and the son of a Moroccan-born historian of the Lusophone world – is ...

Cicero's life was bookended by two momentous events: the fall of Roman Republic and the rise of the future Augustus. Llewelyn ...

Montefiore refuses to treat the Middle East as an exclusively Arab or Muslim arena. Turks, Persians, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, ...

Waiting for Permission - Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965–66 by David Kynaston ...

Every now and then, a serious scholar wins the lottery. An academic journal publishes their research and the article crosses ...

Prime Minister Burnham’s brush with investors in gilts was short and sour. He argued that Britain needed to stop being ‘in ...