‘Impossible.’ Thus spake Martin Amis at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October: ‘Very few writers have got anywhere with sex.’ Nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award seem to have viewed this ...

Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

James Lovelock will be eighty-seven this year. For the last forty-five years he has been an entirely independent scientist, unattached to any institution. He is qualified in medicine, chemistry and ...

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the ...

‘To capture the fish is not all of the fishing,’ insisted that dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey; and, whilst that may be true enough, I feel my spirits sink whenever I see an angling book promoted ...

In her second novel, Mary Lawson returns to the fictional setting of her first – Crow Lake. The lake, in the far north of Canada, proves an apt metaphor for her narrative: ‘the silvery ever-moving ...

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

For a traditionally male-dominated society, China has had its fair share of powerful women who rose to the top, albeit thanks to their husbands. Under the Tang dynasty, Wu Zetian, who lived from 625 ...

In 1990 a brown-paper parcel came to light in the strongroom of the solicitors firm Linklaters and Paines in London. It had been deposited there in 1947 and had been addressed to Parr’s Bank, Regent ...

FRIENDSHIP, FOR ALL its delights, is often seen as a poor relation of passionate love. It has long had what one might call its 'romantic' and 'ethical' critics. The romantic critic (like Proust) finds ...

Reading the publisher's blurb for this novel, I'm disappointed. It promises an 'exciting new departure' from Maggie O'Farrell's previous work, the best book you'll read all year, and so on. 'Exciting' ...

From the moment of liberation in August 1944, Charles de Gaulle made Resistance the hallmark of Frenchness. Freedom, he proclaimed in a moment of high emotion (and perhaps shrewd calculation), had ...