In the mid-August silly season, excitement for bored hacks was provided by a rumour of mysterious origin, about a London bus driver who had received a fortune – the statutory ‘cool...

There are all kinds of things to do with books apart from reading them, and one of the most pleasurable is to dream of reading them. Many of us keep scribbled or notional lists of such dreams,...

A young man, hectic and dirty, sits on a park bench in a cold city. He is wild, nervous, seems to fiddle with his soul. Beside him, an old man is holding a newspaper. The young man begins a...

Old Tunnockians The ritual of the taxi ride to my uncle’s funeral, its names Leuchars, Pitlessie, Blairgowrie, Kippen, Balfron. Passing a village shop whose window reads YOU CAN’T TOP...

The first of the great Indian novelists to write in English, R.K. Narayan, wrote modest novels about modest people living in the small South Indian town of Malgudi. The completeness of the world...

For all its glories, the postwar British theatre has driven an embarrassing number of its brightest stars into exile. Conventional wisdom attributes this to a combination of parsimony and...

Recent interpretations of Medea have tended to focus on issues of gender and race, portraying her either as a feminist challenging Jason’s misogyny, or as a freedom fighter on behalf of the...

Motion Sickness A recessed bachelor, living with his parents in the great American heartland, seeing no one but family. He alone, Thomas Lucchesi, the relentless reader and rumoured writer among...

Taxonomy Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78) Weeks out of school: in rainstorms and grandmothers’ cupboards, bear-dark in the corners, filigrees of lacewing and silt; the birds we saw in books:...

In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter...

‘You,’ the mother of six-year-old Hugh informs him, ‘are the only white child in the whole of West and Central Africa, that I know of.’ The remote outpost of Empire, made...

Somewhere around the middle of An Atlas of the European Novel, in a discussion of images of London in the 19th-century novel, Franco Moretti throws in a parenthetical aside on the whereabouts of...

Any Dick Francis novel about horses and crime satisfies my definition of a myth: like a myth, it is one of a corpus of interrelated stories (most, though not all, about horses, and many about an...

Suitcases Piled in the corner of a second-hand store in Toronto: of course it’s an immigrant country. Sometimes all you can take is what you can carry when you run: a photo, some clothes,...

Less than two years after the publication of Alex Garland’s first novel, The Beach, one of cinema’s most fashionable young directors (Danny Boyle) and its most adored male star...

Nobody normally​ gets killed round here; they’re mostly detached houses and you never even hear shouting. So it took me a minute to tipple to what she was saying. I said: ‘Dead? Is...

In February 1940, a Reynolds News reviewer wrote of the three Sitwells, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell: ‘Now oblivion has claimed them, and they are remembered with a kindly if slightly...

Here comes Stanley Spencer with his pram – his bowl-cut – and his crazy-uncle specs – so this must be your childhood Ruby – must be Cookham – must be 19 –...