If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

In 2007, Faber published an attention-grabbing debut novel called Apples, a read-in-a-day tale of adolescent angst and ecstasy written by young Middlesbrough resident Richard Milward. I am so ...

Emily Brontë, Margaret Mitchell and J D Salinger are writers who, for whatever reasons, had just one novel published in their lifetimes. They must have drawn at least some satisfaction from these ...

WHEN I was once rashly defending Susan Chitty against Michael Holroyd’s attack on her for plagiarism, I was effectively silenced on being shown The Great Donkey Walk, by Susan Chitty and her husband, ...

I felt culturally isolated, almost curmudgeonly, during the first parts of Christopher Bray’s new book. He contends, in chatty demotic, that ‘we’ had our tastes changed in music, painting and fashion ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...

British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

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, ...

The Durrells was a hit series for ITV last year, happily filling the gap left on Sunday evenings by the end of Downton Abbey, presenting a real family, with its jokes, squabbles and obsessions. It ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Yezhov means ‘Hedgehog’, although Stalin called him affectionately Yezhevichka, ‘little bramble’. Despite the implicit prickliness, there was momentary relief in the USSR when, in autumn 1936, Stalin ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...