Why is it, when Islamism has damaged the image of Islam so comprehensively, that the faith seems to retain a huge popularity?

England, tutted fifteenth-century Frenchmen, is where they kill their kings. Though the comment’s smug self-satisfaction ...

James Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd turned bestselling author, made his name writing about the rhythms and realities of ...

Ahead of next year’s centenary of The Great Gatsby, the inevitable revisiting of Fitzgerald gets under way. Two new ...

The whorehouse of thought” is how Claude Vignon, a journalist in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), describes newspapers.

After an exchange with Brian Vickers relating to disputed questions of dramatic collaboration I had researched with Laurie ...

One Saturday eleven years ago, I put on an ill-fitting suit and caught a train to Gatwick Airport. I headed to an airport hotel, where a “coloured diamonds” investments firm was recruiting a new crop ...

Doors – as means of escape or entrapment, of release or privacy – proliferate in Roddy Doyle’s new novel. At the beginning of The Women Behind the Door, in which three older women are en route to ...

It is sobering to think that, if he continues to train at his current rate, Richard Powers may one day be able to generate a text all but indistinguishable from an actual work of literary fiction. Don ...