Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

My immediate reaction to this excellent biography of an excellent woman was surprise. Why didn’t I know more about her already? Phyllis Bottome wrote thirty-three novels and a dozen volumes of short ...

Nikolaus Pevsner means only one thing to millions of people: The Buildings of England. The series is synonymous with him, or vice versa. Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s Pevsner, later ...

‘Anyone of no public eminence of whom the world in general has never heard (and I come into both these categories) is presumptuous in thinking he can write a book which people will want to read.’ Thus ...

‘Impossible.’ Thus spake Martin Amis at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October: ‘Very few writers have got anywhere with sex.’ Nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award seem to have viewed this ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Andrew Miller likes to shift the ground beneath his reader's feet. His first two novels, Ingenious Pain and Casanova, were set in the eighteenth century; Oxygen alternated between Paris, Los Angeles ...

The smiling, Bermuda-shorted figure on the jacket of John Updike’s new volume of essays and criticism looks engagingly pleased with the world and himself, and the first sentences of his Foreword tell ...

What makes reading Margaret Atwood such fun is her gift for enjoying herself so thoroughly as she writes. She makes you share her zest for words, people, jokes, sharp-edged description and endless ...