The books we’ll be buying for Christmas are making themselves known, their places in the various longlists and shortlists fiercely discussed in the papers. Every named writer wins a sticker on their book…
Dictators dislike detective novels. Both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany outlawed crime fiction in 1941. The crime novel, according to the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture, weakened the health of the…
In recent years there has been a significant shift in understandings of transgender identity. So often caught up with ideas about sexuality, the liberalisation of attitudes towards gays and lesbians has…
Learn this labyrinth, Holly … so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness. So Jacko, Holly Sykes’s “freaky little brother”, says as he hands his sister a “diabolical”, nine-circled…
If my Facebook feed is anything to go by, last month parents scrabbled to make costumes of popular characters from children’s books. They were preparing for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual…
My early teenage summers were spent either on trips to India with my sister to see our friends and family, or at home in the UK. In either place they were full of long days spent reading on a veranda or…
As soon as the teaching term finished, I went into the bookshop to buy some holiday reading. I came away with three books: no tomes these. They were all graphic novels. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic…
The idea that entertainment has an effect on our politics might seem ludicrous to some. Many would scoff at the notion that the Star Wars saga might have influenced the political socialisation of Generation…
This year’s Edinburgh fringe has seen the UK premiere of Siddhartha: The Musical. The show is based on the classic novel Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse, winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature…
I don’t often re-read books, partly because there are so many on my unread pile. There are just a few that I go back to over and over again: Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The Bell Jar – and Lucky Jim…
Poetry for the Palace, an exhibition at Edinburgh’s Holyrood House, has been timed (its website proclaims) to mark the halfway point of Carol Ann Duffy’s laureateship. The exhibition places the openly…
Welcome to Guilty Pleasures, a summer series in which academics reveal their most embarrassing cultural inclinations. Ever wanted to know what literature professors delve into on holiday, when they can’t…
My Night with Reg, Kevin Elyot’s 1994 play, has returned to the London stage, poignantly only a few weeks after the death of the playwright. Set in London’s gay community in the 1980s, the play follows…
Virginia Woolf – so Hermione Lee writes in Virginia Woolf, her 1997 biography of the celebrated writer – thought it immensely difficult to ever know another person. Today the winner of the 2014 National…
It is perfectly understandable for an editor to be protective of his own patch, but it is worrying when the editor of a national magazine, which claims to be the leading independent Australian literary…
As we begin to commemorate the outbreak of World War I in earnest, just how central the “Great” war is to Britain’s conception of its history is ever more obvious. And this is also very true in terms of…
Think Mary, Queen of Scots and a few key facts probably come to mind: she was Catholic, she was imprisoned and she had her head chopped off. But a poet who offers insight into 16th-century women’s writing…
This year’s run-up to the naming of the Man Booker Prize winner has just begun, with the announcement of the 13 novels that make up the longlist. They will soon be dissected and analysed by readers and…
The handwritten manuscript of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables (1862) – from which the blockbuster stage show and numerous movies ultimately descend – has arrived at the State Library of Victoria (its…
Young adult fiction and complex themes go hand in hand – not least in one of the most recent entries to this field. Melbourne-based writer Eli Glasman’s debut novel The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper…