Books
Femmes du monde
At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an… Read more
Resounding successes
The British Library’s ‘Spoken Word’ series, drawing heavily on the BBC archives, has already shown quite a range — from Tennyson’s famously crackly reading of ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’… Read more
Man of mysteries
It was always William Wilkie Collins’s good luck — though in later life something of a humiliation — that he was dragged along on Dickens’s coat-tails — not least in… Read more
A horrid story of intellectual corruption
The death of a great author often causes interminable displays of corrosive envy. Heirs, acolytes, interpreters and academics resent one another’s claims on the literary estate or cultural heritage. They… Read more
A kind of tenderness
The son of a grocer, Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov. While studying medicine at Moscow university, he published hundreds of comic sketches… Read more
Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical life
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Entry to the sacred grove
Some readers may wonder if we need this book. Surely, the argument might go, one can summon up potted ‘lives’ on the internet, while serious biographies take book form. And… Read more
Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester
Those of us who have spent an embarrassing number of hours immersed in the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer have learned to live dangerously. We have been overturned in high… Read more
The worst crime was to be a bore
Gully Wells is a spirited and amusing writer, the daughter of the American journalist Dee Wells and the stepdaughter of the famous philosopher Freddie Ayer. While an undergraduate at Oxford… Read more
Latest blogs
- Obama’s Berlin speech was a damp squib Freddy Gray
- PMQs sketch: In which Labour join the coalition Lloyd Evans
- Michael Gove kindly warns Stephen Twigg: people think you’re weak Isabel Hardman
- ‘Jihad!’ Douglas Murray
- The Tories are still flummoxed by social media Isabel Hardman
- The Supreme Court Mothballs the British Army Alex Massie
- Ed Miliband’s negative approach at PMQs looks set to become the norm James Forsyth
