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 ...

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 ...

‘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 ...

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 ...

Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers are, by now, one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction. Everyone with even half an eye on the genre knows he’s somewhere near the top. He is ...

There is now a thriving C S Lewis industry. It would be very surprising if this were the only book about Lewis to appear this year. Of course, there is also something of an A N Wilson industry. It ...

In a contemporary life of Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, there is a story about King John, whom the bishop knew well. The two of them were standing outside the abbey church at Fontevraud in the ...

When I was young, England was a much odder country than it seems today, and every now and then – much to the delight of its inhabitants – its oddity was celebrated in print by some fond but puzzled ...

The Oxford Book of English Prose, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared in November 1925, exactly twenty-five years after The Oxford Book of English Verse. The immense success of the latter, ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

Susan Bridgen is a rare creature among Tudor historians writing for a general audience. Her style is spare, her manner cool and impersonal. Not for her the luxuriant prose, the passionate engagement ...