The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

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 ...

In lines written in 1912, the Sevillian poet Antonio Machado asked God to protect a young Spanish child because otherwise ‘one of the two Spains’ would ‘freeze his heart’. The concept of las dos ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

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 ...

Soul? What Soul? An alluring book title, I’m sure. What about a book called ‘The Soul of England?’ The Chinese soul, ancient or modern, like other souls, longs for freedom and wealth, material and ...

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 ...

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a family that he describes as being of the media borghesia. He graduated with honours in chemistry shortly before the racial laws prohibited Jews from taking ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

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 ...