When the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid suffered from sleeplessness, which was all too often, he did what any sensible caliph would do: he summoned Masrur, his favourite executioner. As readers of The ...

It’s hardly a likely setting for an epiphany, a party full of the rich, the richer and the richest, all ghastly, in a marquee shrouded in ‘wastes of grey velvet’. Not exactly where you’d expect a ...

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2011, A L Kennedy objected to ‘Hollywood endings’ and ‘people wanting the unobtainable’. She’s certainly not a writer we associate with happily-ever-after: ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who ...

Joyce Carol Oates has always drawn heavily on the gothic, finding truth in horror and horror in truth. Her best-known, much-anthologised short story, ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’, a ...

Memories, memories, ah, fond memories! Flicking rapidly through the above-mentioned tome for the purposes of this review, I could not help but recall those golden days in the early Seventies – or was ...

Susan Bridgen is a rare creature among Tudor historians writing for a general audience. Her style is spare, her manner cool and impersonal. Not for her the luxuriant prose, the passionate engagement ...

I should, perhaps, begin by saying that Michael Schmidt is my friend and, quite frequently, my publisher. Ought this to disqualify me from reviewing his mammoth study of fiction in its full-length, ...

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 ...

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

I WELL REMEMBER the shock of excitement and the odd feeling of recognition I felt when I encountered Robert Browning half a century ago. When you are trying on different selves in adolescence, ...

It is a brave, some might say foolish writer who embarks on a history of the English Civil War these days. The grand historical narratives of the war that raged from 1642 to 1649, written by the likes ...