Why is it, when Islamism has damaged the image of Islam so comprehensively, that the faith seems to retain a huge popularity?

England, tutted fifteenth-century Frenchmen, is where they kill their kings. Though the comment’s smug self-satisfaction ...

James Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd turned bestselling author, made his name writing about the rhythms and realities of ...

Ahead of next year’s centenary of The Great Gatsby, the inevitable revisiting of Fitzgerald gets under way. Two new ...

The whorehouse of thought” is how Claude Vignon, a journalist in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), describes newspapers.

After an exchange with Brian Vickers relating to disputed questions of dramatic collaboration I had researched with Laurie ...

It is sobering to think that, if he continues to train at his current rate, Richard Powers may one day be able to generate a text all but indistinguishable from an actual work of literary fiction. Don ...

Doors – as means of escape or entrapment, of release or privacy – proliferate in Roddy Doyle’s new novel. At the beginning of The Women Behind the Door, in which three older women are en route to ...

On the shores of the Arabian Sea in western Pakistan, Gwadar was once an out-of-the-way fishing town. Since 2015 Chinese investment has transformed it into Gwadar Port City, maritime terminus of the ...

“Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival”, Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography, beautifully encapsulating not just the character’s creation, but ...