When Pietro Russell, the anti-hero of A Fool’s Alphabet, thinks of an afterlife, he imagines ‘a hell that is entirely composed of hotel bathrooms’. There will be the bars of soap, too tightly packed ...

I drive to Wiltshire on a rare sunny English summer’s day to interview V S Naipaul in his country home. All his books, fiction and non-fiction, are to be reissued (by Picador in Britain and Knopf in ...

This is an interesting, informative and wrong-headed book, at its best when the author ignores her own theoretical assunlptionsand gives us straight forward literary history. The problem with Julia ...

This book is designed to accompany the BBC series of the same title, broadcast this autumn, but like so many of the books that producer Laurence Rees has authored, it stands on its own as a thoughtful ...

MARGARET FORSTER IS the author of this fictional diary, a revelation which disappointed this reader; a compulsive diarist myself, I had thought it was genuine. Forster's invented diarist is a Miss ...

First published exactly seventy years ago, Sir John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 has never been out of print. Compact and clearly written, it somehow managed to encompass a ...

The Queen Mother’s life was one of the longest, happiest and most successful of her time. She was not only happy herself but had the gift of making those around her happy too. She has quite captivated ...

Andy Beckett was born in 1969. ‘I have been hearing what was wrong with Britain and British politics in the Seventies all my adult life,’ he complains. ‘No other theme has been as unrelenting. The ...

In 1992 Peter Owen published an excellent life of Anna Kavan by David Callard. That he should now so soon publish another by Jeremy Reed is an indication of his enthusiasm for this demanding but ...

Many of us, as we approach our seventies, finally get round to a bit of ancestor hunting. Some turn their family stories into books. Andrew Scott has gone one further and used his ancestral village in ...

The Oxford Book of English Prose, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared in November 1925, exactly twenty-five years after The Oxford Book of English Verse. The immense success of the latter, ...

In 1613 Henry, Lord Ros, eldest son of the Earl and Countess of Rutland, ‘sickened very strangely’. Within months, the boy was dead. His younger brother, Francis Manners, then fell ill with similar ...