Saul Bellow had what one of his characters in Ravelstein calls ‘a gift for reading reality – the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it’. Bellow seems to outstrip other ...

Of all the aspects of the Third Reich, it is perhaps the SS that attracts the most junk history. Observed through the prisms of Hollywood and various war mags such as Commando and War Picture Library, ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...

It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

DAVID PEACE BEGAN the first novel of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, about the Ripper killings and other grim goings-on in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s, with a quotation from Harry S Truman: ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...

From 7 September 1940, London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for fifty-seven consecutive nights. More than forty thousand civilians were killed and a million homes damaged or destroyed. Other British ...

Frankly, it was a triumph. Eight hundred people had gathered in the Barclays MegaCash Pavilion at the Hay Festival to hear me talk about my latest book. I was a little nervous, as I am accustomed to ...