A German novel set in eighteenth- century China and published in 1916 might seem to hold little interest for an English-speaking readership today. However, the author in question, Alfred Döblin ...

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 ...

“The whorehouse of thought” is how Claude Vignon, a journalist in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), describes newspapers. Vignon shares his contempt for the industry which employs him with the ...

James Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd turned bestselling author, made his name writing about the rhythms and realities of life on a hill farm passed down through his family for generations. Though ...

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 ...

England, tutted fifteenth-century Frenchmen, is where they kill their kings. Though the comment’s smug self-satisfaction seems a little at odds with the bloody factionalism and civil war that tore ...

Why is it, when Islamism has damaged the image of Islam so comprehensively, that the faith seems to retain a huge popularity? This paradox of a popular ugliness torments the politics of Europe, India ...

Ahead of next year’s centenary of The Great Gatsby, the inevitable revisiting of Fitzgerald gets under way. Two new biographies offer different approaches. Arthur Krystal’s Some Unfinished Chaos: The ...