A divorcee in her sixties named Rose travels to Almería to see a specialist, who may or may not be a quack, about a mystery ailment that may or may not be imagined. She is accompanied by her daughter, ...

When Churchill declared victory, the young people of the church paraded a full-size effigy of Adolf Hitler to the green and ...

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had ...

A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–45 by Michael Haag; The Durrells: The Story of a Family by Richard Bradford ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...

Orwell is having another moment in the age of Trump, Putin and #MeToo. Aside from the two books under review, five major works of non-fiction on Orwell and one novel inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four ...

The centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses – a work described in Finnegans Wake as the ‘usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles’ – will rightly be a cause for much rejoicing in Ireland and elsewhere. The ...

It takes a brave writer to tackle once more the monumental figure of W H Auden. Any new book appears against the background of John Fuller’s exhaustive literary and bibliographical work on the poet, ...

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud ...

Helen Thompson appears quite frequently in the public prints, notably the New Statesman, and co-presents the Talking Politics podcast, where she comments sensibly and objectively on the passing scene.

Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of James Joyce is a triumph. Regularly described as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, it weaves together the threads of Joyce’s life and work in a ...

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 ...