Among the bombings that marked the beginning of 2017, one took place on New Year’s Day at the CasaPound bookshop in Florence, an outpost of the Italian neo-fascist or ‘alt-right’ CasaPound movement, ...

David Gelber: Heroic Work in a Very Important Field - Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times by Phillipa K Chong ...

The Smile Jamaica Concert, scheduled for 5 December 1976, was intended as a celebration of Jamaican unity: in the National Heroes Park in Kingston, the most famous living Jamaican, Bob Marley, would ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

Christopher Hitchens: Enoch Who Hurt Me So Dreadfully - The Lives of Enoch Powell by Patrick Cosgrave ...

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 ...

Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel, The Hand that First Held Mine, confronts the difficulties and wonders of motherhood. Through the lives of two women, Lexie and Elina, living a generation apart, a story ...

‘The Infant Modernists’ is one of the great unwritten works of critical biography. Shiningly specific childhood experience, the oeuvres of Woolf, Joyce and T S Eliot all insinuate, lies at the heart ...

Chainless souls are a bit like stray dogs; you feel sympathy for them in theory but you don’t really want to be landed with them for very long. Katherine Frank’s A Chainless Soul, the first biography ...

The ranking of American presidents by historians and political scientists is a much-loved exercise. Part of the fun is watching reputations rise and fall over time. Currently, even those who have long ...

Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

Ian McEwan’s shift, fully twenty years ago now, from the unique impassive weirdness of his first novels and story collections towards a sleek if never quite untroubling respectability won him legions ...