Literature
There’s something about Mary (Wollstonecraft and Shelley)
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
The prophet Tolstoy and his dodgy vicar
One fine day in June 1896, a lone Russian nihilist visited Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. Come to hear…
Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
Is any kind of sex still taboo in literature?
Is there any kind of love that novelists still can’t touch?
Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
Breakdowns, suicide attempts — and four great novels
Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a…
'Where are the happy fictional spinsters?'
This book arose from an argument. Lifelong bookworm Samantha Ellis and her best friend had gone to Brontë country and…
Look! Shakespeare! Wow! George Eliot! Criminy! Jane Austen!
Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island…
Lose weight the Muriel Spark way
Those of you dieting your way to a svelte physique amid the flesh-exposing terrors of summer should take courage from…
Mind your language: The springs before the Arab Spring
Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In…
