‘Like that black president, you’d think … you’d get used to square watermelons, but somehow you never do,’ says Me, the disingenuous black narrator of Paul Beatty’s latest, Booker-shortlisted novel ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

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 ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

When the wife of King Minos of Crete developed an unhealthy passion for a bull, she clambered inside a mechanical cow fashioned by the craftsman Daedalus and promptly conceived the Minotaur. The ...

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 ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

In October 1948 a 37-year-old Waffen-SS officer named Fritz Knöchlein was tried before a British military court in Hamburg for a particularly nasty and gratuitous war crime. It had happened eight ...

Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

Textiles, from dress and furnishing fabrics to tapestries, seem to be the hot topic this summer, with a number of books on the subject. Now ACC have come up with Textile Design. This profusely ...