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 ...

I’m not sure what stands out for you when you think of the late 1990s – DeLillo’s Underworld? The dot-com bubble? Titanic? – but for me it’s two things: working (somewhat reluctantly) in New Age ...

Stephan Thernstrom, 56, a professor at Harvard University for 25 years, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars of the history of race relations in America. He has tenure. He has won prizes and ...

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, a drama played out thousands of miles away in Beijing. Two court officials were arguing about how Italian Jesuits in China should be treated. One of these, ...

Inverting the old cliché, Christopher Hitchens said, ‘Everyone has a book in them and that, in most cases, is where it should stay.’ The journalist and satirist Karl Kraus agreed: journalists, ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Dainty enough to perch at the top of a Christmas stocking, Adrian Tinniswood’s celebration of the Victorian rise and mid-20th-century slow collapse of the country house party is a richly anecdotal ...

Often books about the Third Reich have a last chapter called ‘Götterdämmerung’ or ‘Twilight of the Gods’. The Wagnerian link seems apt; wasn’t the anti-Semitic German nationalist Hitler’s favourite ...