In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

'Pi ecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

Alma tell us, All modern women are jealous, Which of your magical wands Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz? So runs the chorus of Tom Lehrer’s witty 1965 ballad about Alma Mahler, widow of three ...

JOHN CAMPBELL CONCLUDES his monumental biography of twentieth-century Britain's greatest peacetime prime minister with the Latin tag: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Margaret Thatcher's eleven ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...

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 ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

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 ...

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 ...

Like all Milan Kundera’s recent books, Ignorance was first written in French. Kundera refuses to write in Czech or to translate his work into his native language, claiming that it takes him a year to ...