The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2011, A L Kennedy objected to ‘Hollywood endings’ and ‘people wanting the unobtainable’. She’s certainly not a writer we associate with happily-ever-after: ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

The Italian Renaissance has been exercising its magnetic power over tourists, scholars, composers, playwrights, artists and novelists since its beginning. Indeed, there is now held to have been a ...

J ames Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

‘Always historicise!’ With this resounding imperative, Fredric Jameson opens his third major work of Marxist literary theory, of which the precursors were Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House ...