Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

What is perhaps most striking about Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is its slightness. The latest work to appear in English by Mathias Enard – the heavily garlanded darling of French letters ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

Winifred Nicholson never forgot the first viewing that she and her husband, Ben Nicholson, had of Christopher Wood’s pictures. All of them were then living in Chelsea, Wood in a house that belonged to ...

William Boyd’s novel Restless, winner of the 2006 Costa Novel Award, describes the adventures of Eva, a young Russian émigrée, who is recruited for the British Secret Service during the Second World ...

In October 1948 a 37-year-old Waffen-SS officer named Fritz Knöchlein was tried before a British military court in Hamburg for a particularly nasty and gratuitous war crime. It had happened eight ...

The Murderess was first published in 1902 (this translation by Peter Levi appeared in 1983), and is widely acknowledged to be the masterpiece of Greek novelist Alexandros Papadiamantis. It is a sad ...

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...