Tom Crewe

It is not​ a coincidence that the quality of writers in Parliament has declined along with the quality of the political class – most of its contemporary representatives are poor at speaking and reasoning, with no sign of what Denis Healey called a ‘hinterland’ – and that this has been simultaneous with a collapse in respect. Is Chris Bryant an exception? Labour MP for...

When​ we happen across a gay man in the 19th-century novel, we do just that. We are made suddenly aware of him, standing in sharp relief against the busy background, apparently having very little to do with it. Usually, we see him just for a moment. Often we do not trust ourselves: we do a double-take. Occasionally, there is a flash of recognition. ‘It seemed to me,’ Henry James...

Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.

I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the...

Irecently​ told someone that the day after the 2015 election was the worst of my life. It wasn’t much of an overstatement. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition was so awful, so stupid and cynical and cruel in its austerity programme, that the news that the Tories, in defiance of all the opinion polls, had been rewarded for it with a majority – that George Osborne would continue as...

It has always been​ said of George Meredith that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘as a novelist he can do anything except tell a story.’ ‘Regarding narrative,’ J.B. Priestley declared, ‘every novel that Meredith wrote is not merely faulty but downright bad.’ On Meredith’s centenary in 1928, Arnold Bennett summarised the problem: ‘He wanders...