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 ...

On 14 June, Christie’s auctioned the cellar of a well-known wine authority and burnt Lloyd’s name. At the heart of the sale were two ‘super-lots’ of 195 and 197 cases, for each of which the reserve ...

I enjoyed this book a great deal more than I expected to – my hackles rise at thick volumes entitled Age of this or Pursuit of that. And the dedication to Eric Hobsbawm is hardly encouraging. But ...

Sheer bluff, calling a book like this The Critical Heritage. The Critical Detritus would be nearer the mark. Any good writer needs to be read in a new way; it might be argued that the creaks and ...

David Edgerton is a myth-buster extraordinaire. Whether explaining how new technologies did not at once supersede old ones (steamships were slow to overtake clippers) or demonstrating that Britain was ...

For a huge book somewhat solemnly intended as a further pillar for a huge reputation (complementing a Collected Poems in 2003 and a Selected Translations in 2006), these letters of Ted Hughes are ...

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 the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been presented as a prototypical crusader, a paragon of religious toleration and the progenitor of a united Spain. David Abulafia goes in search of ...

Though nearer to forty than thirty when the Second World War began, Evelyn Waugh deliberately chose branches of the army where he was most likely to be exposed to great danger – serving in the Royal ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been ...

On the last day of May 2001, The Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash went to see George W Bush at the White House. Preparing for his first official trip to Europe, the new President had invited a ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...