W ith The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Andrew Miller likes to shift the ground beneath his reader's feet. His first two novels, Ingenious Pain and Casanova, were set in the eighteenth century; Oxygen alternated between Paris, Los Angeles ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...

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 – ...

Lustrum, the second volume of Robert Harris's trilogy following the life, career and political travails of Cicero, is a splendidly researched historical blockbuster of real human depth and political ...

This is the autobiography of the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest, and return to tell the tale. His friend and comrade Tenzing Norgay was second on the rope to the summit: whether George ...

A popular riposte to the idea of evolution is the so-called ‘argument from design’. The discovery of a pocket watch on a hillside leads naturally to the inference of the existence of a watchmaker. The ...

The mystery of Agatha Christie's extraordinary appeal is the subject for investigation in this engaging study by Robert Barnard, and by the end of the book you should be a lot clearer about the ...

George Steiner once had interesting and unusual things to say, and he said them in a way that was all his own. Since then (perhaps for the greater part of the time that he has been a known name), he ...

John Gray is an acknowledged master of the calculated overstatement. He likes to make us think. And he does it by throwing the equivalent of intellectual hand grenades. Consider the following claim – ...

Gate of Lilacs is, in Clive James’s words, a ‘quinzaine of rhapsodies’: a poem of fifteen parts in blank verse that is also a critical essay on Proust. ‘His book,’ says James, ‘big for a book, is ...

John Barrow has been called the father of Arctic exploration. ‘In fact,’ says Fergus Fleming firmly in his jolly new book, ‘he was the father of global exploration.’ Barrow was appointed Second ...