In her latest book, which tells the stories of three generations of women, and the men who love them, Penelope Lively presents us with a wholesome vision of England. It begins in 1935, when a ...

John Gray: Being Human - At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell ...

In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

I sometimes think there is a new interest in the well-made tales of the Edwardians. D J Taylor’s new novel, Trespass, acknowledges a debt to Tono-Bungay, and Alan Judd’s novella, The Devil’s Own Work, ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

Sometime in the 1930s, a wealthy Argentinian matron was strolling in the park of Palermo, in downtown Buenos Aires, when she suddenly noticed an old beggar woman. A notable feature of the park is its ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

In Charlotte Grimshaw’s fiction, characters come and go and then come again. Her 2009 short-story collection, Singularity, reacquainted us with old friends from her previous collection, Opportunity ...

Book Reviews by subject: Bookends17th Century 20th Century Ancient World Asia Audiobooks Autobiography & Memoir Bibliophiles Bookselling Chile Collecting Diaries England Evelyn Waugh Fiction Food and ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...