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 ...

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 ...

Lustrum, the second volume of Robert Harris's trilogy following the life, career and political travails of Cicero, is a splendidly researched historical blockbuster of real human depth and political ...

This marvellous book contrives to be both a memoir and a novel for reasons I may not divulge. It is an account of 100 years in the lives of a Welsh hill-farming family, told by the oldest child, ...

Not another book about the Nazis! The heart sinks further at the first sentence of this 600-page volume: 'This book is the first of three on the history of the Third Reich.' Can there really be ...

John Barrow has been called the father of Arctic exploration. ‘In fact,’ says Fergus Fleming firmly in his jolly new book, ‘he was the father of global exploration.’ Barrow was appointed Second ...

Gate of Lilacs is, in Clive James’s words, a ‘quinzaine of rhapsodies’: a poem of fifteen parts in blank verse that is also a critical essay on Proust. ‘His book,’ says James, ‘big for a book, is ...

Private Life was one of only three novels that Sagarra wrote. Although criticised on its appearance for its scandalous subject matter, it has become his most famous book on account of its accurate ...

Here love is made astonishingly immediate and sensually illicit – ‘Your breasts and shoulders would reek’ – and the poem gains from being both magical and clear. Being English and sensible, I find too ...

There is now a thriving C S Lewis industry. It would be very surprising if this were the only book about Lewis to appear this year. Of course, there is also something of an A N Wilson industry. It ...

The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

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, ...