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 ...

How is a totalitarian state like a love affair? They both leave archives behind when they go. How is a totalitarian state like a bad love affair? The archive that survives the end of each is a ...

In 1611, the Somerset-born traveller Thomas Coryat described an Italian architectural novelty: a ‘very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building: the edge whereof ...

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is this year's winner of the @BGPrize. In her review from our June issue, @rosalyster delves into Tasmania, nuclear physics, romance and Chekhov.

You might think me eccentric for feeding my cat the highest-quality pet food, made with free-run chicken and turkey, freshwater fish and cage-free eggs. But I should not be considered the weird one.

It’s said that Oxford was spared destruction on the scale of Coventry because Adolf Hitler wanted the place as his capital after he conquered England. Ashley Jackson’s engrossing new book describes ...

Our Evenings is the seventh novel by Alan Hollinghurst and a wonderful example of what he is so good at: staging richly bookish, hifalutin comedies of sexual errors featuring people coming to terms ...

Claudia Petrucci’s captivating debut novel not only rewards but demands rereading – fittingly so, given that repetition, redefinition and the retracing of steps are among its preoccupations. In the ...

If you have never come across the name Stafford Beer (I hadn’t), you should probably not be reading this book. Behind his enormous beard and impressive moustache, Beer was a consultant who developed ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

On a cross-Channel ferry at the start of her honeymoon, my mother met Clement Attlee. In those innocent days, there was nothing odd about a former prime minister exchanging a few words with a stranger ...

When F Scott Fitzgerald fell in love with Zelda Sayre in the late 1910s, he was as impressed by her courage on the high diving board as by her flesh-coloured silk swimming costume. Her fearlessness ...