Every now and then, the writer Josephine Humphreys has suggested, our lives veer from their day-to-day course and become for a short while “the kind of life that can be told as a story – that is, one in…
The staggering amount of information in the world can be overwhelming. This is partly why genres such as detective fiction are so popular – they resonate with the human desire to control and order the…
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, and was voted The Greatest Novel of All Time in a London Daily Telegraph poll of 2008…
The Natural History Museum’s plan to remove “Dippy”, the cast of a diplodocus skeleton, from its entrance hall, and replace it with a genuine skeleton of a blue whale has been met with outrage. The #savedippy…
I was on a train recently reading a book of poems by Carol Rumens when the elderly man sitting across the table said, “Do people still read poetry?” He frowned as though rats had re-infested his basement…
Colleen McCullough, writer of the highest-selling Australian book, died yesterday aged 77. The novel that consumes her legacy, The Thorn Birds (1977), is one that Germaine Greer described as the “best…
In 1998, if Congress hadn’t extended copyrights by 20 years, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind would all be in the public domain…
Still Alice – starring Julianne Moore – tells the story of Alice Howland, a linguistics professor diagnosed with a form of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Moore has already netted a Golden Globe and is…
Whatever your opinion of book prizes, they remain a useful tool for understanding what is popular in the literary world. The Costa Book of the Year, awarded this year to Helen Macdonald for her book H…
In a revealing moment from Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 “nostalgia-noir” novel, hippy private eye Doc Sportello speaks to a client, Trillium Fortnight, who is able to diagnose the whereabouts of…
The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is the most recent export of a particularly Scandinavian expression of personal struggle. This ethos of resistance to larger socio-political forces, coupled with…
While Christmas shopping in a local bookshop, a handsome little volume stopped me in my tracks as I was leaving. The dust jacket is midnight blue with a gold-foil constellation slightly obscuring the title…
The television adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies is already being hailed as possibly the “greatest period drama ever made”. Certainly, much has been made of its attention to historical detail…
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, the victims of the Holocaust stand, with a good reason, at the centre of our attention. It is survivors’ memoirs that shaped…
Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission has been greeted by a predictable mix of anger and uncritical bias toward the author, a typical reception for the most controversial French author of the past two decades…
This year the UK’s biggest poetry award, the TS Eliot prize, has gone to David Harsent for his 11th collection, Fire Songs. He joins a sequence of prestigious poets such as Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott and…
The magi, as you know, were wise men – wonderfully wise men – who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. So O Henry tells us in his classic Christmas…
Christmas is a time to give generously and receive graciously. And yet… And yet. Many of us have opened Christmas presents and thought: what does it say about me that you thought this – this! – was the…
Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, was an ardent defender of children’s literature, believing the works of Beatrix Potter to be equal to “the greatest English prose writers that have…
In 1937 a fairy tale about a reluctant hero with hairy feet was published by a tweedy English academic called JRR Tolkien. The Hobbit was an instant success – and its mighty sequel The Lord of the Rings…