Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the ...

The years covered by this fourth and final volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters were creatively productive ones for him, even if his best-known works – plays such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp ...

For a traditionally male-dominated society, China has had its fair share of powerful women who rose to the top, albeit thanks to their husbands. Under the Tang dynasty, Wu Zetian, who lived from 625 ...

From the moment of liberation in August 1944, Charles de Gaulle made Resistance the hallmark of Frenchness. Freedom, he proclaimed in a moment of high emotion (and perhaps shrewd calculation), had ...

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 ...

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 ...

Joyce’s later fiction is now, alas, widely tolerated in English Departments and the general reader of an uncut Ulysses is unlikely to be prosecuted, even, now, yet. Colin MacCabe's long-advertised ...

In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

Frankly, it was a triumph. Eight hundred people had gathered in the Barclays MegaCash Pavilion at the Hay Festival to hear me talk about my latest book. I was a little nervous, as I am accustomed to ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...