‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of ...

When I went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1960, freshmen (we were all men) were presented with a potted history of the place written almost forty years earlier by its then master, Arthur ...

As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections.

It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity. Kate Loveman tells the tale. Arthur ...

After producing two superb collections of short stories, Sweet Home and Dance Move, the Belfast-based writer Wendy Erskine has a lot to live up to in The Benefactors, her debut novel.The good news is ...

Hassan Akram: Norfolk Rhapsodies - Poppyland by D J Taylor. Most short-story collections consist of what Kingsley Amis described as ‘chips from the novelist’s workbench’ – disparate pieces written ...

Sarah Dunant’s latest work of historical fiction, The Marchesa, centres on the life of Isabella d’Este, marchesa of Mantua (1474–1539).Isabella married Francesco Gonzaga, the marchese, at the age of ...

In Mislaid, the novel that brought her to widespread attention, Nell Zink drew on her background in rural Virginia and tackled transgressive subject matter with a wry sense of humour.Her latest novel, ...

In 1832, Charles Darwin, then a little-known 23-year-old graduate, arrived in South America aboard HMS Beagle on the first leg of his voyage around the world. His impressions were mixed. While he ...

Over the past two decades, there has been a quiet revolution going on in historians’ understanding of how England’s ‘Great Civil War’ came about. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, a broad ...

‘Dad,’ my son said in early 2022. ‘You can’t write a book about boys and men without mentioning Andrew Tate.’ I responded with the question millions of parents have probably asked: ‘Who is Andrew Tate ...