That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

David Goodhart is one of those brave souls with the energy to engage in a perpetual, corrective dialogue with his former comrades on the Left, for nowadays he describes his support for Labour as ...

‘There’s a fine line between fiction and non-fiction,’ Kinky Friedman once wrote, ‘and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979.’ The wry protagonist of Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel, The Illogic of ...

IN 1810, AT the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had almost 150,000 seamen and Marines, serving in 150 ships of the line and a further 183 cruisers. It was the greatest navy in the world, ...

The ‘Tyger’ of my title cannot be unfamiliar to the readers of the Literary Review. Prof. Miner, however, needs a brief introduction. He is Professor Paul Miner, a literary scholar, who is reported to ...

The New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe is best known in his native land for Empire of Pain (2021), an exposé of the Sackler dynasty and the role of their drug company Purdue Pharma in the ...

Christopher Marlowe is having a moment. In London’s West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company is staging Born with Teeth, a new play by Liz Duffy Adams that imagines the erotic tension crackling between ...

Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...

THE JEROME SISTERS were the first wave of American beauties to marry into the British aristocracy, the precursors of a tide of 'Dollar Princesses' eager to swap cash for titles. Unlike their ...

The lives of women, both extraordinary and ordinary, and, in particular, the tension between domesticity and independence are subjects frequently revisited in the work of the novelist and biographer ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

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 ...