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 ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Soul? What Soul? An alluring book title, I’m sure. What about a book called ‘The Soul of England?’ The Chinese soul, ancient or modern, like other souls, longs for freedom and wealth, material and ...

Often books about the Third Reich have a last chapter called ‘Götterdämmerung’ or ‘Twilight of the Gods’. The Wagnerian link seems apt; wasn’t the anti-Semitic German nationalist Hitler’s favourite ...

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a family that he describes as being of the media borghesia. He graduated with honours in chemistry shortly before the racial laws prohibited Jews from taking ...

When they are bound to serve, love and obey? Should there perhaps be an option to alter the word ‘obey’ as there is in certain wedding services? Fiona Shaw, in Jonathan Miller’s production, is the ...

I’m not sure what stands out for you when you think of the late 1990s – DeLillo’s Underworld? The dot-com bubble? Titanic? – but for me it’s two things: working (somewhat reluctantly) in New Age ...

Remember the emotional bit at the end of Peter Pan, when the dancing light of Fairy Tinkerbell is flickering and dying, and Peter asks the children in the audience to make her well by clapping their ...

When I was military attaché in Rome, an Alpini general once asked me who were the ten greatest British generals. I replied that there would not be much argument about the top five but that opinion ...

East Asia is a graveyard for the sort of visionary diplomatic ambition that gave birth to the European Union. As in Europe, there are well-established states linked by a common cultural heritage – in ...

I’m an avid reader of Donleavy's novels of the sexual picaresque, though I suppose that, as a femininist, I should be ashamed of myself. A new one, Schultz, and the re-issue of The Onion Eaters (1971) ...

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...