On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

John Haffenden: Interview with Iris MurdochBorn in Dublin, Iris Murdoch was brought up in England and took a degree in classics at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1942. After two years as an Assistant ...

If novels are going to be as rich in reference as Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, I do think the publishers should be encouraged to add optional reading lists at the end. Fludd is a funny, exquisitely written ...

A divorcee in her sixties named Rose travels to Almería to see a specialist, who may or may not be a quack, about a mystery ailment that may or may not be imagined. She is accompanied by her daughter, ...

On the second floor of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence is the Cancelleria, where Niccolò Machiavelli worked as a secretary. Although now shorn of its original height, shape and much of its natural ...

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2011, A L Kennedy objected to ‘Hollywood endings’ and ‘people wanting the unobtainable’. She’s certainly not a writer we associate with happily-ever-after: ...

Michael Millgate wrote the first version of this biography twenty years ago. It has now been extensively revised, and much material not then available has been incorporated. It is fair to call it a ...

The title of A New Literary History of America is misleading, as Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors virtually admit in their introduction. ‘A literary history of America?’ they ask, and then go on to ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...

Mary Hollingsworth: View from the Palazzo - Out of Italy by Fernand Braudel; A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar ...

This book left me brooding – about some doggedly entangled problems. Class. Novel. Style. The third first. As writing, it’s a pallid effort, ‘competent’, a compromise tepid style, little bite, no ...

What makes reading Margaret Atwood such fun is her gift for enjoying herself so thoroughly as she writes. She makes you share her zest for words, people, jokes, sharp-edged description and endless ...