No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

Book Reviews by subject: Literature and Literary Criticism & 21st Century December 2021 Issue Martha Rampton Wave Formations Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1950–2020 ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...

At midnight on 16 August 1801, boats from Nelson’s squadron launched a daring attack on Napoleon’s invasion flotilla at Boulogne. The plan depended upon surprise, however, and when the British were ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

D J Taylor is an underrated novelist. Kept was the best of the glut of Victorian pastiches that came out a few years ago. He sets scenes and evokes place and period in an almost painterly way, and ...

Angry advocate of violence and sombre prophet of the anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon was also a natty dresser and enjoyed a gin-and-tonic. A black, middle-class psychiatrist from Martinique, who ...

J ames Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

Book Reviews by subject: Women in history & Britain & 21st Century November 2024 Issue Frances Cairncross The Price of Parenthood The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality By David ...

Perfectly timed for the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic narrative of the Hundred Years’ War takes the story from Richard II’s death in 1399 ...