When the third instalment in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet intruded though my south London letter box, the daffs on the balcony were waning and the tulips were warming up on the touchline to take their ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

Emily Brontë, Margaret Mitchell and J D Salinger are writers who, for whatever reasons, had just one novel published in their lifetimes. They must have drawn at least some satisfaction from these ...

In 2007, Faber published an attention-grabbing debut novel called Apples, a read-in-a-day tale of adolescent angst and ecstasy written by young Middlesbrough resident Richard Milward. I am so ...

I felt culturally isolated, almost curmudgeonly, during the first parts of Christopher Bray’s new book. He contends, in chatty demotic, that ‘we’ had our tastes changed in music, painting and fashion ...

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 ...

WHEN I was once rashly defending Susan Chitty against Michael Holroyd’s attack on her for plagiarism, I was effectively silenced on being shown The Great Donkey Walk, by Susan Chitty and her husband, ...

The Durrells was a hit series for ITV last year, happily filling the gap left on Sunday evenings by the end of Downton Abbey, presenting a real family, with its jokes, squabbles and obsessions. It ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

Yezhov means ‘Hedgehog’, although Stalin called him affectionately Yezhevichka, ‘little bramble’. Despite the implicit prickliness, there was momentary relief in the USSR when, in autumn 1936, Stalin ...