Blended families are complicated enough in real life; in fiction they pose significant challenges. When a minor character announces, ‘My daughter’s ex-husband was a fraudster and a thief’, even the ...

In his superb American Pastoral, Philip Roth displayed signs of wanting to examine his kind of people in greater philosophic depth: Swede Lermontov, a Newark Jew who has moved to the mink-and-manure ...

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

Geoff Dyer, as it's by now no more than a truism to acknowledge, is a writer of rare and eccentric talents. He seldom produces anything that fits into a straightforward genre, preferring to stir ...

In the USA, the Holocaust has become an inescapable feature of public life. There is a Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington, a Holocaust Day, commemorative parks in many cities, and ...

In 1793 Henry Blundell, one of England’s pre-eminent antiquities dealers, faced a little problem. While browsing the sale of artwork from the estate of William Ponsonby, the second Earl of Bessborough ...

Alan Sheridan has written a biography of Gide. It is the story of Gide’s life and the history of the many books that Gide published. He writes therefore both as an historian and as a literary critic.

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

Retired politicians have cornered the market in biographies of great leaders. These books annoy historians because they pinch their research and sell more copies. They tend to be uncritically admiring ...

A work whose title links war to the ‘death of news’ must prove a malign relationship between the two, and this one doesn’t. News isn’t dead; neither war nor Donald Trump has killed it. Martin Bell’s ...

Ashton Applewhite is a ‘writer and activist’ and she has had another epiphany. The last one was that the institution of marriage is a white heterosexual male capitalist trick to enslave women. The ...

In 1613 Henry, Lord Ros, eldest son of the Earl and Countess of Rutland, ‘sickened very strangely’. Within months, the boy was dead. His younger brother, Francis Manners, then fell ill with similar ...