It is hard to change our minds, notes Julian Barnes, who has changed his on several occasions. After a lifetime of thinking Georges Simenon and E M Forster overrated as novelists, he now admires them.

Out of their cupboards they come tumbling, the skeletons thrust there in haste, or tucked neatly in, locked away by several or furtively concealed by one. William Trevor has brought out a new book and ...

This is the singular and spectacular trajectory of George Forster, subject of Andrea Wulf’s irresistible new biography.

Donna Tartt likes to start her books with a death. In The Secret History (1992), the victim was a college student called Bunny. The prologue made it clear that our narrator had blood on his hands and ...

In this engaging and well-researched book, Ollie Randall sets out to show how cricket and literature worked in a symbiotic ...

WHEN ARTHUR BRYANT presented the sanitised version of Lord Alanbrooke's diaries in the 1950s, he called the volume that culminated with El Alamein 'The Turn of the Tide'. Winston Churchill, in an ...

In this difficult-to-classify book, Ian Sansom – best known for his mystery novels, which I’ve read and enjoyed – rambles through (or beside) one of the great modern poems: ‘September 1, 1939’ by W H ...

In the capital, Tallinn, an air of indigence hung over the Soviet shops where Estonians queued hopefully for scrag ends of ...

When the American journalist Suzy Hansen first arrived in Istanbul in 2007 on a research trip for an NGO, the promise of a ...

When I first came to west Cornwall in the 1960s Barbara Hepworth’s small, dark, intense figure seemed as much part of the landscape of St Ives as the sculptures she made to adorn it. Her decision to ...

Her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely loveable … one of her rare expressive looks was something to ...

More than this, he sees the assaults of the 1980s as intensely damaging not only to Oxbridge, but to British culture more ...