In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

Anyone anticipating bucolic bliss from Melissa Harrison’s second novel will be forewarned. Its prologue is narrated by the ghost of someone just killed in a road accident: ‘two cars, spent and ...

Convinced of her own brilliance, Gertrude Stein wished to be ‘as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan’ and laboured tirelessly to ensure that her celebrity would outlive her. @sophieolive examines the real ...

Convinced of her own brilliance, Gertrude Stein wished to be ‘as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan’ and laboured tirelessly to ensure that her celebrity would outlive her. @sophieolive examines the real ...

When they are bound to serve, love and obey? Should there perhaps be an option to alter the word ‘obey’ as there is in certain wedding services? Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller’s production, is the ...

Conflict between the forces of light and dark has long been the stuff of storytelling, but seldom is the hero a work of architecture. In effect this is what Simon Mawer has done in his engrossing new ...

O you youths, Western youths, So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O pioneers. Thus wrote ...

The premature death of Italo Calvino made front-page news in Italy. In the Corriere della Sera John Updike, the writer responsible for introducing him to the Americans, wrote that Calvino’s death had ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

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 ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...