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According to one outline narrative of British literary history, lyric had displaced epic as the dominant poetic genre by the early nineteenth century. Out with “Man’s First Disobedience”, “Arms, and ...

Huawei – one of the world’s largest and most powerful technology firms – is rarely out of the media spotlight. Yet we know surprisingly little about its origins and inner workings. In House of Huawei, ...

Like many a murder mystery before it, The Violet Hour opens with a suicide: a young man throws himself from the top of a Victorian water tower in south London. He is later revealed to be Luca Holden, ...

Suetonius’s biographies of the rulers of Rome, from Julius Caesar to the emperor Domitian, are rich in character and telling detail – as emerges with clarity from Tom Holland’s excellent new ...

Money to Burn (Penge på lommen, 2020) is the first in a projected seven-novel series by the Danish poet and novelist Asta Olivia Nordenhof. The author has already given the next six books their titles ...

Recently republished by Virago, with an illuminating foreword by Camilla Grudova, Caroline Blackwood’s The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) is a forgotten classic about suburban monstrosity. Too often ...

According to many scholars in a variety of social sciences and economic disciplines, the world has, over the past two decades, uneasily and unevenly entered the period of “state capitalism”. In this ...

In the shadow of St Peter’s Basilica, across the piazza degli scalpellini, or “square of the stonecutters”, lies another, more ancient structure. Dedicated to the first Christian martyr, the monastery ...

The Museum of Lost and Fragile Things is a fever dream of a book, gripping and trippy. Suzanne Joinson, a bestselling novelist, describes growing up on a council estate in Crewe, Cheshire, in the ...

Guess who’s back? “He is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the defenceless.” Do you know who ...

It is 1964, somewhere near Birbeck College. A thirty-three-year-old Roger Penrose and the famously effusive mathematical physicist Ivor Robinson are returning to work from lunch. The otherwise ...