Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

According to Elizabeth Goldring in this engrossing biography, the earliest recorded use of the term ‘miniature’ in English literature comes in Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance The New Arcadia, ...

Ten years ago I was detailed to go for the Independent on a visit to Flanders organised by the historian Lyn Macdonald to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the Armistice. I spent three days ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

THERE ARE SOME books which condemn a man more by praising him than by attacking him. Bernard-Henri Livy's biography of Jean-Paul Sartre combines an irritating pseudy style - most of the book is not ...

Forgive me if I sound a bit fractious, a little staccato this month; the imminent arrival of the Academy Club downstairs has subjected us to long weeks of shuddering floors and dull reverberating ...

Any book with the title The Bell of Treason should be a warning to us that we are about to read a morality tale. While ‘Munich’ – the Munich conference of 1938 – has long been a byword for appeasement ...

ONLY AN EDITRESS of considerable tact and taste, breeding and discernment, could have invited me to review this book. After all, I have eaten Patricia Cockburn’s bread and salt. I have sat up with ...

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 ...