Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

On 1 May 1976, a sixty-foot Polynesian voyaging canoe named Hōkūle‘a sailed southeast into the Pacific Ocean from the Hawaiian island of Maui. Double-hulled, steered by a long paddle and powered by ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Biographers of T S Eliot face a number of challenges, not least the marked disinclination of their subject to having his biography written at all. When, in the early 1960s, a scholar wrote an account ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

There is not enough fiction in Hollywood and that’s a fact. Not enough Hollywood either, for that matter. Do not let the title of Gore Vidal’s new blockbuster fool you into thinking that it belongs – ...

Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid ...

This is a book about people, in V S Naipaul’s opening words, a book of stories. He sees himself returning to his initial literary vocation, as a manager of narrative, giving news about others. The ...

Like any landscape after a flood, everything looks different since the advent of the #MeToo movement. Contours have shifted, new lines have been drawn. Of course, changes were afoot long before Harvey ...

This is quite a jolly academic book written by a linguist for the general reader about internet language. It has already had considerable success in America. The curious thing is that it’s a book at ...

As India powers its way up the world GDP rankings, a case is being made for recasting its national history as ‘world history’. By looking beyond India’s boundaries and focusing on the global context ...

In his 1913 story ‘Kleist in Thun’, the Swiss writer Robert Walser depicts Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) living and writing alone in a villa in the Bernese Oberland. ‘Weeks pass,’ Walser writes, ...