This handy compilation (to which I myself contributed a couple of notices) covers, according to the jacket copy, ‘some 1500’ poets and ‘charts the shift from...

When Jane Fonda told an interviewer for Family Circle some months ago that she was heavier than she had previously been but also ‘more comfortable’ with her body, Associated Press...

Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx has been one of the more intriguing literary successes of recent years, and one which raises some interesting questions about the always fraught and...

George Bush’s proud declaration that by bombing fleeing Iraqi soldiers America had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all’, was one of the more startling instances from...

1. My mother sits in a chair, beside the tape-deck which is at present playing Kathleen Ferrier singing something by Gluck. By far the most usual something, I suppose. Orpheus’s lament for...

From the outset, ambiguity enfolds The Plum in the Golden Vase, David Tod Roy’s translation of the first volume of the monumental 16th-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei. The title,...

There was little to suggest, twenty-odd years ago, that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision...

Thrillers are routinely deemed ‘chilling’, as though our feelings of fear and cold are in some way interchangeable. Yet outlandishly low temperatures alone cannot account for the...

Ten days after I was, you were born. Heading out past sixty, I’m still hanging on But you baled out at thirty, telling the world ‘Dying is an art. I do it exceptionally well.’...

It’s hard to think of a writer who publishes a book every ten or twenty years as garrulous, or of a person who produces his fourth novel at the age of 72 as prolific; but we need some such...

Gothic horror tale, detective mystery, autobiography, political history: Jonathan Coe’s appealingly ambitious new novel involves a promiscuous intermingling of literary genres, as a potted...

nec quicquam nisi vulnus erat (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 388) I A bright clearing. Sun among the leaves, sifting down to dapple the soft ground, and rest a gilded bar against the muted flanks of...

‘If God knows our ends, why cannot he prevent them, why is the world so full of malice and cruelty, why did God make it at all and give us free will if he knows already that some of us will...

If the adults can’t bear to read Roald Dahl’s stories, then childhood nirvana is attained. Adults are to be poisoned and shrunk into nothingness, dragged unwillingly on their deathbed to live in a...

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 666-797) But that’s nothing to what happened in Crete. Once upon a time there was a man called Ligdus, from near Knossos – a nobody, but freeborn, honourable...

Richard Poirier, now in his middle sixties, seems to me perhaps the most eminent of our living literary critics, at least in the United States. He has a central position in contemporary American...

This is a compendious, layered novel – see ‘historiographic metafiction’ in the narratology handbook – the sort of novel that intercuts time zones and genres of fiction...

Scott Bradfield is a campus novelist. Still just under forty, he taught for five years at the University of California at Irvine while getting his PhD in American literature. He then took a job...