‘This is the story of two middle-class families’, a prefatory note to All Our Yesterdays tells us; two families, it goes on, that suffer the ‘impact of Mussolini’s fascism’. It is also a ‘simple story ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

The relationship between mother and daughter is probably the most insidious, powerful, elaborate and devastating connection known to woman. (It can, of course, alternatively be the most powerful, ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...

Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...

Nancy Campbell, a published poet, has written an intriguing book on human interaction with ice, in both practical and artistic spheres. It is a pleasant brew infused with elements not only of travel ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

Tim Weiner is a reporter specialising in intelligence matters for the New York Times. His history of the CIA escorts readers through all the routine sites of left-wing indignation, from Guatemala and ...

According to a little note printed at the back of The Widow and the Parrot, Quentin Bell and his brother commissioned the piece from their Aunt Virginia for publication in the family newspaper the two ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

Laura Freeman’s memoir of her teenage years and her early twenties, The Reading Cure, recounts her fight with anorexia. But it is not so much a diary chronicling the painful stages of the illness as ...