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 Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

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 ...

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 ...

According to the Knights Hospitallers’ own foundation legend, their origins went back to a time before the Crusades and even before Christ. They held that their original hospital in Jerusalem had been ...

The city of Cheliabinsk, deep in the Russian Urals, was one of the closed cities of the Soviet Union to which all foreigners were denied entry. In the 1930s it housed a giant tractor factory, the ...

After an excursion to Argentina, the chief exponent of minimalist melancholy has returned to his own ground. Colm Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night, was set in Galtieri country, in the ...

With Eisenhower’s armies closing in on Hitler’s Reich in the spring of 1945, Allied intelligence experts warned of a last-ditch stand by the Nazis in an Alpine redoubt and of a nationwide ‘Werewolf’ ...

James Le Fanu is our most incisive medical journalist, and in his excellent new book he turns his attention to the dangerous and expensive phenomenon of overprescribing. We have long passed the stage ...

AS ALL HIS biographers have discovered to their cost, a life of Browning is inevitably a life of his wife. Although the poet was married late and widowed early, his years with Elizabeth Barrett left ...

Halford Mackinder is not much read these days. The British geographer and imperialist’s emphasis on the enduring strategic and political importance of the earth’s physical features and resources ...

Nearly thirty years have passed since Edward Said published Orientalism. That book shifted the intellectual climate – more exactly, degraded it – by propagating a new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed ...