Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

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 ...

Andrew Miller likes to shift the ground beneath his reader's feet. His first two novels, Ingenious Pain and Casanova, were set in the eighteenth century; Oxygen alternated between Paris, Los Angeles ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

J G Ballard’s new novel is as the title implies a psychopathic tour-de-force, in which the author’s genius for suspense, powerful atmospherics and evocation of place is displayed with consummate skill ...

‘The whole pleasure of marriage’, according to G K Chesterton, ‘is that it is a perpetual crisis.’ He had no time for David Copperfield’s second wife, Agnes – an embodiment of lifeless perfection to ...

Recently the BBC television presenter Jeremy Paxman published a book on the British Empire intended to answer the question of ‘what ruling the world did to the British’ (as his subtitle put it). Of ...

I once asked a former Oxford classics don which verse translation of Homer he thought was best. He shrugged before saying, ‘Read Homer in Greek, or else in prose.’ On the face of it, this looks like a ...

In the summer of 1897, two aspiring Greek poets, who were also brothers, ended their brief tour of Europe by spending three days in Paris. For the younger brother, Constantine Cavafy, those three days ...

Early in the first essay of Sir William Empson’s last book his Chinese expertise comes in handy. He quotes an officiously vague sentence of Emile Legouis on Marvell’s use of mythology and deftly ...

Modernism had a long run, more than a century indeed. Its duration and variety make it almost impossible to define. When Cyril Connolly gave us his 100 Key Books of the Modern Movement, he included ...

DESPITE ANNE MELLOR’s promise to examine ‘the entire range of Mary Shelley’s life and writing’, two-thirds of this book are dedicated to an analysis of Frankenstein, ‘Shelley’s greatest novel’ ...