In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

It’s probably the most quoted slogan in feminism and certainly among the best-known theses in all philosophy: ‘On ne naît pas femme: on le devient.’ On the dust jacket of Kate Kirkpatrick’s incisive ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction is in a dystopian decline. In The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), there is plenty to object to – the mangled prose, for starters. But at least that novel holds together as ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

THE SWEET FAMILY snap of a doleful-looking little Indian boy in a party hat being held by his formally suited father on the dust-jacket of this rather strange memoir gives no warning of its ...

9/11 continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary fiction, from Jay McInerney's The Good Life to Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. The Reluctant Fundamentalist tackles the subject from a ...

As Hilary Spurling writes in the second and concluding volume of her already acclaimed life of the great French painter, ‘It is not the least mysterious thing about Henri Matisse that he has had no ...

This is the thirteenth anniversary of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Its purpose is to gently dissuade writers from filling their novels with redundant, badly written or embarrassing passages of sex ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

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 ...