AFTER ANITA BROOKNER'S brief experiment with an elderly man as the main character in last year's novel, The Next Big Thing, her trademark women are back at the centre here - and back with a vengeance.

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Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century chronicler of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, memorably described the Gothic ruler Alaric as ‘a victorious leader, who united the daring spirit of a barbarian ...

Does the misuse of the word ‘literally’ make your toes curl? Do the vocal tics of young ’uns set you worrying about the decline of the noble English language? You are not alone. But your fears are ...

The good news is that we’re all doomed. Humankind has made such a hash of the stewardship of creation that God looks like a chump for entrusting it to us. Most of the biosphere would be better off ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

‘If there is an occupation for which women are utterly unfitted, it is that of the detective,’ claimed the Manchester Weekly Times in 1888 – already behind the times, it seems, as women had been ...

Hiroko Oyamada’s first novel, The Factory, won her the Sinchō Prize for new Japanese writing; The Hole, her second, took the Akutagawa Prize in 2013 and now appears as a smart little hardback in a ...

‘Art, considered as the expression of any people as a whole, is the response they make in various mediums to the impact that the totality of their experience makes upon them, and there is no sort of ...

When he returned to France from England in 1728, Voltaire joined a consortium to buy the French government’s lottery, which made him serious money. He used some of it to restore a chateau belonging to ...

Family life unfolds in David Roberts’s brilliant debut novel, The Way the Day Breaks, in backseat squabbles and sodden walks. There are camping holidays in the Pyrenees and subdued meals in front of ...

‘The mistake we the establishment made internationally was in the 1990s and 2000s when it was all going well – when we thought we’d really sorted out a marvellous new world.’ So Kenneth Clarke ...