The year 1918 was an extraordinary historical moment. As the Great War roared to an end after four long years of blood and horror, it appeared briefly that the future of the world lay wide open. The ...

As I see it, the argument of this most interesting, readable and generously provocative book is more or less as follows: the British, in the course of consolidating their worldwide empire during the ...

In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...

One’s initial response is, why bother? Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of Robert Graves covers the same period as Good-bye to All That. It is no criticism to say that she writes less well than ...

In a city of six million surveillance cameras, how do you disappear? This is the problem confronting Adam Kindred, the hapless meteorologist at the centre of William Boyd's jaunty and involving new ...

A rich body of legend has gathered around the figure of J H Prynne. In Iain Sinclair’s novel Radon Daughters (1994) he becomes Simon Undark, ‘hermit and scribe, the conscience of England’, ‘famous for ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

It’s not an admission that reflects all that well on me, but every now and then, as I read through this excellent and revelatory volume of posthumously published Kafka stories, I found myself thinking ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

These two books look at medicine down opposite ends of the telescope. The second tells us what it is like to be a doctor in modern conditions; the first reminds us just how recent a phenomenon in ...

Asked to name the greatest American poet, Robert Lowell once replied ‘Milton’. The joke had a point to it. Contemporary English poets in the mainstream admire poets like Marvell or Robert Graves who ...

Stylisation – the fatal awareness that one is writing just as one used to, only a touch more so – gets us all in the end. With Kingsley Amis it led to a series of late-period novels that threatened to ...