The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

In 1999 Joanne Harris made her name with her third novel, Chocolat. None of her books since then has had quite the same effect, particularly not the disappointing psychological thriller blueeyedboy.

So much seems to have happened in the crowded and explosive place called Europe since the end of the Second World War that it would seem to defy any historian to encapsulate it in one medium-sized ...

Towards the end of of The Folks That Live On The Hill, Kingsley Amis describes an old devil's difficulties with novels. Freddie finds it hard to concentrate. One immediately feels a certain sympathy.

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 ...

IN HIS THIRTY-FIVE years of life, Paul Nizan was a key intellectual in the French Communist Party. He published three novels, polemical essays, translations and a large quantity of militant journalism ...

It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...

The life of Eric Hobsbawm is a study in the making of a reputation. Like many other intellectuals who spent their early years in interwar central Europe, he turned to communism as a means of resisting ...

The Rub of Time, Martin Amis’s new collection of literary essays and journalism from the past three decades, sits in a broad valley of subject matter, between the Olympus governed by the ghost of ...