In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...

Uncertain why you are reading this? Good, because I’m not any more certain why I’m writing it. It’s not for material gain – contrary to rumours creeping through the darker reaches of the web, this ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

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 ...

‘Was it mere coincidence that liberal secularism developed in the Christian west?’ With this rhetorical question, Larry Siedentop begins one of the most stimulating books of political theory to have ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

The Oxford Book of English Prose, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared in November 1925, exactly twenty-five years after The Oxford Book of English Verse. The immense success of the latter, ...

Pretorian-born Damon Galgut first came to the notice of British readers in 2003 with The Good Doctor, a dark, disturbing tale of a run-down hospital in the post-Apartheid homelands. It was shortlisted ...

Like any landscape after a flood, everything looks different since the advent of the #MeToo movement. Contours have shifted, new lines have been drawn. Of course, changes were afoot long before Harvey ...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the loose group that came later to be labelled 'The Georgians' all knew each other: poets, painters, editors, critics (there seemed enviably little ...