Although Sylvia Plath is admired by many literary scholars and even adored by some passionate readers, critics have not been unanimous in their assessment of her art. Irving Howe declared in 1972 that ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

From Iceland to Ethiopia, medieval Christendom produced an alarming number of saints. The vast majority of them commanded local or unofficial cults and never passed through the refining fires of papal ...

The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K Field ...

The idea that all of us have a self – essential, irreducible and inherently valuable – is something that’s accepted across social divisions, party-political lines and ideological differences. The mere ...

The launch of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the most anticipated publishing events of the 21st century. When Amazon dispatched pre-ordered editions ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

Fanny Duberly was the horse-loving wife of a Victorian cavalry officer. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854 she was twenty-six, cheerful, childless and strong-minded. She was among the handful of ...

Happy families are, famously, not the stuff of fiction. The Cloughs, who are the subject of the prize-winning poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s second novel, are an ordinary, close-knit, middle-class family who ...

The Smile Jamaica Concert, scheduled for 5 December 1976, was intended as a celebration of Jamaican unity: in the National Heroes Park in Kingston, the most famous living Jamaican, Bob Marley, would ...

The original French thriller on which Andrew Lloyd Webber based his musical opens on a performance of Faust. Its star, Carlotta, sings the role of Margarita, and enraptures her adoring public until ...

This book marks the latest salvo in a long-running war between the Stratford-based Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, under the auspices of which it is being published, and the American-based Shakespeare ...