literary history
Comfort reading for the interwar years
The Book Society’s recommendations in the 1930s included novels by Dorothy Whipple, E.M. Delafield, C.S. Forester and A.J Cronin, with popular history from Arthur Bryant
Writers to the rescue
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…
A battle of wits
Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak…
A colourful pot-pourri
For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The…
Birds of a feather
Philip Hensher describes how Paris became a magnet for literary-minded lesbians in the early 20th century – where they soon caused quite a stir
Where the soul sits alone
If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana,…
Riotous performances
Emma Smith examines the peculiarly disruptive effect of Shakespeare’s plays on American society over the centuries
Five bluestockings in one Bloomsbury square
The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’…
The serious games of the Oulipians
Have you heard of the Oulipo? The long-running Parisian workshop for experimental writing? Even if you haven’t, you might have…
Stuck for something to read? Pick up a Penguin Classic
In 1956, after Penguin Classics had published 60 titles, the editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, William Emrys Williams, wondered: ‘How many…
The vampire’s role in Marxist philosophy
‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t…
One vast, blaring cultural circus
In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I…
1386 and all that
Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry
God save England
The patriotism of the Great War’s finest poets was neither narrow nor triumphalist but reflected an intense devotion to an endangered country and to a way of life worth dying for, says David Crane
How to read well
What the title promises is not found inside. It is a tease. John Sutherland says he has ‘been paid one…
The house-party from hell
It is perhaps the most celebrated house-party in the history of literary tittle-tattle: a two-house-party to be precise. Byron and…
Beyond this, nothing
This may sound a little orientalist, but Tangier has some claim to being the most foreign city in the world.…
The muse in the bottle
The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his…
