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 ...

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 ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

For the modernist designer Enid Marx, folk art, or what she called ‘popular art’, was ‘hard to define though easy enough to recognise when seen’. Marx and her partner, the historian Margaret Lambert, ...

There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would ...

Clarissa Eden’s 21st-century counterpart is Sir Philip May. They both married short-term prime ministers who failed in crises because of misjudgements that stemmed from their characters. Both Anthony ...

‘Inheritocracy’ is an ugly word to describe an increasingly important social and economic development: the passing of approximately £5.5 trillion in housing wealth from baby boomers, Britain’s first ...

Whither the literary salon? Once there was the Viennese coffeehouse, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots; now we have Starbucks and Twitter. The setting of Mark Bowles’s intelligent debut novel is ...

Some places are mythic only to those who don’t live there; others are mythic even to those who do. Geriatric US Beatle­maniacs, on pilgrimages to Menlove Avenue, Strawberry Field, Penny Lane and the ...