At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

This magazine’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award has never shied away from speaking truth to power as well as literary celebrity. Alastair Campbell is a two-time nominee and Tony Blair was touted for an ...

Time Out, for instance, is characteristically anaemic. Despite its agitprop listings any pretensions to ‘alternative’ status look decidedly flimsy as it gaily retails some more Sloane Ranger jinkettes ...

A C Grayling has carved out a niche not only as a lucid and accessible interpreter of philosophy for the general reader but also as a passionate advocate for the role that it can and should play in ...

This large book is both rewarding and demanding. It offers information in abundance and, like Sir Barry Cunliffe’s previous publications from OUP, it is beautifully written and illustrated. But what ...

In this difficult-to-classify book, Ian Sansom – best known for his mystery novels, which I’ve read and enjoyed – rambles through (or beside) one of the great modern poems: ‘September 1, 1939’ by W H ...

‘I recalled closed situations which created their own story out of the twofold need to take refuge and to escape, and which provided their own limitations. Those limitations were also mine,' Penelope ...

In his Commencement Address at Amherst in 1993, John Updike told the students that they were graduating at a time when history was more like a short-story collection than a novel. The Cold War that he ...

In the early pages of In the Land of Giants, Max Adams quotes an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem that describes the shattered stone shells and jagged masonry still standing, three centuries after the ...

Nothing is more irritating for novelists than the expectation of the public that they will remain true to previous form in every way. Publishers in particular are keen on consistency. There is always ...