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 ...

British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

I’m not sure what stands out for you when you think of the late 1990s – DeLillo’s Underworld? The dot-com bubble? Titanic? – but for me it’s two things: working (somewhat reluctantly) in New Age ...

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but 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 ...

Monasteries and convents have in modern times become marginal, countercultural institutions, and the people who live in them are rarities as well as oddities. At university, some contemporaries of ...

Morning and Evening, the latest novel by the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse to be published in English, is a slim book, but it was a big deal when it first appeared in his home country in 2000. It ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

The production and export of cars, machinery and chemicals lay behind the German ‘economic miracle’ of the 20th century. Yet the German economy is now struggling. @HowardJDavies considers who is to ...

Jonathan Coe’s latest book turns out to be a bag of tricks, but it starts sedately enough. Phyl, a recent English graduate, is back living with her parents, Joanna and Andrew, making puns about ...

Our Evenings is the seventh novel by Alan Hollinghurst and a wonderful example of what he is so good at: staging richly bookish, hifalutin comedies of sexual errors featuring people coming to terms ...

When Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine, his hardline views were already widely known. Supporters admired him for his clarity of vision, especially on the ...