Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Since Trump took office, economists have rushed out dire forecasts for growth in America and the rest of ...

The central tension in this refreshingly contrarian book becomes apparent near the start. Discussing Woodrow Wilson’s dictum ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’, pronounced in 1917, Reynolds ...

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 ...

‘Dornford Yates’ was the pen-name of novelist William Mercer, 1885–1960. Of all the authors whose fiction has got about my wits, none has tempted me so clamorously to find out about his factual life.

At the start of his biography of Reinhard Heydrich, Robert Gerwarth, professor of modern history at University College Dublin, muses on the challenge of writing about an individual who is ‘repellent’ ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Anyone seeking the sources of the extraordinary and dark imagination shown in John Burnside’s fiction and poetry should read this memoir of his childhood and adolescence. It is, above all, a portrait ...

Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...