‘Would we have liked to live with him?’ asked Thackeray, contemplating Swift, a question he immediately ducked by supplying a long list of other writers with whom we might prefer to spend our time.

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

'GRIM IS THE lot of the Russian poet: / an inscrutable fate / leads Pushkin to the pistol's barrel, / Dostoevsky to the scaffold', wrote the poet and magus Max Voloshin in 1922 after he witnessed the ...

Joyce’s later fiction is now, alas, widely tolerated in English Departments and the general reader of an uncut Ulysses is unlikely to be prosecuted, even, now, yet. Colin MacCabe's long-advertised ...

It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...

In Arabia Jonathan Raban suggested that if the Arabs were to acquire a genuine contemporary literature, it would be written by women ‘because women were the only people living under the kind of strain ...

Cabin life can arouse contrary passions. Some love it: the quiet, the solitude, the immersion in nature. Others think they love it, only to discover a contrary reality once they turn the latch and ...

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sprawling work of social portraiture stuffed with allusions to Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Although it is set between 1996 and 2001, its themes are urgently ...

Max Porter’s first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), was an ingenious debut in which a recently bereaved father and his two sons are comforted by Crow, an imaginary spirit animal based ...

Midnight at the Pera Palace is a vibrant, entertaining and dazzlingly original social history not only of the city of Istanbul at the dawn of the modern era, but also of the many worlds that ...

To choose sides in the literary feud between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov is almost to make a political (even moral) confession. The two men, at least at first glance, embodied very different ...

Literary biographers like to make large claims for the importance of their genre. If we are to understand a writer’s work, they tell us (with varying degrees of hysteria), we must first arrive at an ...