the thousand there is no existence.

Sir Peter Russell (1913–2006) was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1981. He was also Director of Portuguese Studies, and the author of a ...

Rebecca L. Davis’s magisterial new book, Fierce Desires: A new history of sex and sexuality in America, concludes with a 2023 decision by a federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, to outlaw the ...

“To be Carmanised”, said one of the courtroom victims of George Carman QC, “was a dire experience.” Carman (1929–2001) was the most famous barrister of the late twentieth century – the man who got ...

Toby Lichtig assesses the latest recreation of Bob Dylan, the man and the myth, and David Gallagher discusses an academic and spy who inspired the work of Javier Marías Boris Dralyuk on a compelling ...

Early in Josephine Tey’s classic mystery The Daughter of Time (1951), Inspector Grant, laid up with a broken leg and vainly seeking distraction with a heap of the latest bestsellers, remarks ...

Reading, we all know, is a peculiar act. It takes us out of ourselves into realms we might otherwise have missed – deeper, wider, stranger, perhaps launching us backwards or forwards in time, or into ...

One notable simile in Antony and Cleopatra is uttered by a character of Shakespeare’s own invention, Scarus, according to whom Antony absents himself from the Battle of Actium “like a doting mallard”.

The UK debut of a stand-out Australian poet of her generation, The Jaguar: Selected poems by Sarah Holland-Batt (b.1982) presents a generous selection from three collections of poems, Aria (2008), The ...

We associate extinction with the distant past – with dinosaurs, mammoths or perhaps the dodo. In his book, Lost Wonders, Tom Lathan flips this association on its head by presenting us with ten stories ...

Australia has often been called a “new country,” but its poetry has seldom been thought of in these terms. Les Murray (1938–2019), still the country’s best-known poet, memorably styled himself as a ...