Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, ...

The year 2016, the anteroom to the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917, has already brought us several books that, in various ways, speak to the epochal events that brought down a ...

Helen Pearson: Where Does It All Go? - What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research by Jonathan Gershuny & Oriel Sullivan ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

Who needs another biography of Laurence Olivier? I have just counted eight on my shelf, not to mention the memoirs of his third wife Joan Plowright and those of his elder son Tarquin, his own two ...

Khaled Hosseini’s third novel is an exquisitely rendered study of familial bonds. Opening with the fierce sibling loyalty between Abdullah and his sister, Pari, which acts as the linchpin for a ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

In Michael Haslam we have a genuine major poet of the north of England. Haslam is the most Bunting-esque of contemporary poets, rooted stubbornly in the beloved landscapes of West Yorkshire. Scaplings ...

‘Dornford Yates’ was the pen-name of novelist William Mercer, 1885–1960. Of all the authors whose fiction has got about my wits, none has tempted me so clamorously to find out about his factual life.

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...

Women are afraid of men. Not all of them, all of the time, but they know that men are capable of mixing sex and violence. Men sometimes do what women seldom, if ever do – commit rape. ‘After she was ...

The Western Wind is set in 1491, in the kind of peripheral, unspectacular place in which, we book lovers know, the best stories are often found. Oakham (not the one in Rutland, it seems) is a ...