Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Among the British Museum’s prodigious collection of cuneiform tablets and fragments, strangely parallel experiences befell two scholars. First, in the 1870s, George Smith identified two pre-biblical ...

Given the notorious reluctance of ghosts to appear before impartial observers, anyone attempting to trace the history of the supernatural faces peculiar difficulties. Books on this subject usually ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

EVERYE RA FEATURES certain people who achieve celebrity for doing nothing at all. At the present time anyone who reads the papers – or glances, however surreptitiously, at Hello! – could name at least ...

It is odd to read a novel one simultaneously admires and loathes. The admiration is for the book’s intelligence, lack of sentimentality and often extraordinary phrase-making: the loathing is for the ...

‘The days are days of shaking’, declared the preacher Jeremiah Whittaker in an anxious sermon before the House of Commons in 1643; ‘days of trouble, rebuke and blasphemy’. And, he might have added, ...

Unless I have drastically misunderstood his latest novel, I’m forced to conclude that, in his ninth decade, Norman Mailer has completely dropped his conkers. The Castle in the Forest is a preposterous ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...