‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

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 ...

British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

A game played by all of us who work at the literary end of the book trade, and I expect by mere consumers too, is: spot the real classic, the author who will be widely read in two hundred years’ time.

A hundred years ago to be one of a million Englishwomen was to be doomed. Even intelligent and educated girls could not get a post as a governess – there were too many. Hundreds of thousands resorted ...

Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a ...

The lavatory facilities at Trisha’s bar, that glorious survivor of old Soho, adorned with photos of Al Capone and the pope, bear a legend written at eye level: ‘USE AS URINAL ONLY. NO SITTING.’ Except ...

Montana writer Callan Wink’s debut novel, August, revolves around the coming of age and inevitable growing pains of the titular hero, who moves with his divorced mother from Michigan to ‘big sky ...

‘Of the writing of Churchill books there shall be no end’ is an old publishing saw, and the appearance of these four books underlines it neatly. Each emphasises an important and interesting aspect of ...

After so much press coverage of allegations of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, how much more is there to say on the subject? Quite a lot, it turns out. In She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

Half a century ago Oliver Reed and Kate Millett each had a career-defining moment involving D H Lawrence: Reed when he played Gerald in Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation of Women in Love, with its ...