Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Remember the emotional bit at the end of Peter Pan, when the dancing light of Fairy Tinkerbell is flickering and dying, and Peter asks the children in the audience to make her well by clapping their ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Britpop has morphed into Litpop. Brett Anderson, of the electrifying neo-glam outfit Suede, and Luke Haines, of the archly provocative Auteurs, have each published two volumes of memoirs; Alex James ...

I have been thinking a good deal recently about the night side of the arts of Regency England. Choosing a selection of reverse-lit, partly transparent Regency prints for a small exhibition has led me ...

Between 1918 and 1922, Oswald Spengler published the two volumes of his The Decline of the West. The title gnawed at the minds of the intelligentsia and sent them searching for evidence of the ...

Whither the literary salon? Once there was the Viennese coffeehouse, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots; now we have Starbucks and Twitter. The setting of Mark Bowles’s intelligent debut novel is ...

Giles Foden is justly celebrated for a series of novels set in Africa that mix well-researched historical settings with invented details and highly charged plots. The sequence began in 1998 with The ...

The house across the street from mine – an ordinary two-storey Victorian terrace owned by an absent landlord – has a buddleia growing from a crack in its parapet. It’s a curiously ambiguous sight.

This morning I woke up laughing from a dream. It was about two young men and their podcast. The gist of it was that they reviewed things. Not books but ephemera, offering waspish assessments of ...