Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

Regina Porter’s remarkable debut novel leads us on a journey through America’s mottled history, beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War and ending in the early years of Barack Obama’s ...

The ego-flood of memoir is very strange: I did, I was, I felt, I had, I wanted – I, I, I. But who is this loquacious ‘I’? The I of the present sees their past I in their mind’s eye. Bataille, who knew ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

‘Liberal hegemony’, writes John Mearsheimer, ‘is an ambitious strategy in which a state aims to turn as many countries as possible into liberal democracies like itself while also promoting an open ...

Before sitting down to wade through Christopher Harding’s chunky volume of contemporary Japanese history, containing over four hundred pages of richly embroidered, well-written text, I asked a young ...

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 ...

The story that apparently inspired Barclay Price to write this book is of a Chinese man called William Macao who arrived in Britain in or around 1775 as a servant. Thanks to benign employers, he was ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...

IN HIS THIRTY-FIVE years of life, Paul Nizan was a key intellectual in the French Communist Party. He published three novels, polemical essays, translations and a large quantity of militant journalism ...

In this lively and engaging book, Margaret Jacob, one of the most distinguished scholars of the Enlightenment, navigates a complex topic, over which there has been much debate and considerable ...