British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

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 ...

Often books about the Third Reich have a last chapter called ‘Götterdämmerung’ or ‘Twilight of the Gods’. The Wagnerian link seems apt; wasn’t the anti-Semitic German nationalist Hitler’s favourite ...

When they are bound to serve, love and obey? Should there perhaps be an option to alter the word ‘obey’ as there is in certain wedding services? Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller’s production, is the ...

I’m not sure what stands out for you when you think of the late 1990s – DeLillo’s Underworld? The dot-com bubble? Titanic? – but for me it’s two things: working (somewhat reluctantly) in New Age ...

When I was military attaché in Rome, an Alpini general once asked me who were the ten greatest British generals. I replied that there would not be much argument about the top five but that opinion ...

Remember the emotional bit at the end of Peter Pan, when the dancing light of Fairy Tinkerbell is flickering and dying, and Peter asks the children in the audience to make her well by clapping their ...

I’m an avid reader of Donleavy's novels of the sexual picaresque, though I suppose that, as a femininist, I should be ashamed of myself. A new one, Schultz, and the re-issue of The Onion Eaters (1971) ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

Alan Booth, who died in 1993 at the age of forty-seven, was a London-born writer and journalist who lived in Japan for twenty years and wrote two well-loved travel books, The Roads to Sata and Looking ...

Eco's thoughts on his astonishingly successful novel were originally published in an Italian journal in 1983, and subsequently reprinted as a free supplement to the Italian paperback edition of the ...