Doors – as means of escape or entrapment, of release or privacy – proliferate in Roddy Doyle’s new novel. At the beginning of The Women Behind the Door, in which three older women are en route to ...

It is sobering to think that, if he continues to train at his current rate, Richard Powers may one day be able to generate a text all but indistinguishable from an actual work of literary fiction. Don ...

“Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival”, Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography, beautifully encapsulating not just the character’s creation, but ...

England, tutted fifteenth-century Frenchmen, is where they kill their kings. Though the comment’s smug self-satisfaction seems a little at odds with the bloody factionalism and civil war that tore ...

Why is it, when Islamism has damaged the image of Islam so comprehensively, that the faith seems to retain a huge popularity? This paradox of a popular ugliness torments the politics of Europe, India ...

“The whorehouse of thought” is how Claude Vignon, a journalist in Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), describes newspapers. Vignon shares his contempt for the industry which employs him with the ...

Ahead of next year’s centenary of The Great Gatsby, the inevitable revisiting of Fitzgerald gets under way. Two new biographies offer different approaches. Arthur Krystal’s Some Unfinished Chaos: The ...