In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Denis Diderot, at Catherine the Great’s insistent invitation, spent the autumn and winter of 1773–4 in St Petersburg. It was the worst time of year for an ageing philosopher, underdressed, plagued by ...

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 ...

The Western Isles are often shrunk from the scale afforded the mainland of Britain so as to fit onto a page of an atlas. Love of Country should serve to restore spaciousness, air and attention to this ...

In Charlotte Grimshaw’s fiction, characters come and go and then come again. Her 2009 short-story collection, Singularity, reacquainted us with old friends from her previous collection, Opportunity ...

March 2025 Issue Adrian Poole Cheer Up, Hamlet Shakespeare’s Tragic Art By Rhodri Lewis Shakespeare is Hard, but So is Life By Fintan O’Toole LR April 2022 Issue Lucy Lethbridge Life Lessons from the ...

‘Characters migrate.’ New Zealander Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip takes this aphorism from Umberto Eco as its epigraph and it has multiple resonances in his novel. The thirteen-year-old narrator Matilda’s ...

The mystery of Agatha Christie's extraordinary appeal is the subject for investigation in this engaging study by Robert Barnard, and by the end of the book you should be a lot clearer about the ...

Coleshill is an idiosyncratic version of Auden’s ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, a loving evocation and transformation of the Wiltshire village and landscape where Fiona Sampson feels most at home. Her ...

Perfectly timed for the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic narrative of the Hundred Years’ War takes the story from Richard II’s death in 1399 ...

Stoyo Petkanov, the central character of Julian Barnes’s new novella, is a satirical creation of genius. Three parts Todor Zhivkov, the ghastly former ruler of Bulgaria, to one part Alf Garnett, he is ...

Of all the novelists of the last fifty years, there is no one I more regret not having met than Penelope Fitzgerald. Thls volume, a collection of eighty-four separate pieces (reviews, lectures, and ...