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 ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...

Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson ...

Helen Pearson: Where Does It All Go? - What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research by Jonathan Gershuny & Oriel Sullivan ...

Nicholas Roe: Encompassing Genius - Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

Clare Bucknell: Thinkers & Drinkers - The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

Eric Ormsby: Jinn Fizz - Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange: The First English Translation of a Medieval Arab Fantasy Collection by Malcolm C Lyons (trans) & introduced by Robert Irwin ...

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 ...