About two years ago, I went to London with my wife to look at some Chinese porcelain in the British museum. There’d been a programme about it on BBC4 about ...

It is often said of the greatest novels that they ‘capture life’, and this has probably been an ambition of most major authors. The nineteenth century novel ...

(Warning: contains spoilers!) As far as I know, it was John Galsworthy that first explicitly called War and Peace “the greatest novel ever written.” The cred...

Yesterday, The Communist Manifesto arrived for me in the post, courtesy of ‘World of Books’, an accredited EBay seller. A little green package, all the way f...

I bought my wife a year’s membership of the National Trust for Christmas. Of course, because I can’t expect her to go visiting old houses and looking round t...

So finally. Yesterday, Mrs May announced that she believes Russia interferes in western politics; today, Ciaran Martin, the founding chief executive of the U...

It was Mark Twain who first said, “Write what you know”. “What you know” could include a lot of things, but Twain’s prescription is often taken to mean that ...

“When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the resource we fight for wi...

In 2006, a community action group in Tower Hamlets launched a campaign to prevent a film production of Monica Ali’s bestselling novel, Brick Lane. Its leader...

Who won the Man Booker prize last year? Or the year before? Difficult to say. At least, without Google. Difficult to say anything much about the Booker prize...

007 is the world’s most successful film franchise. Fifty years and counting, and doubly unique in being directly descended from its creator, Ian Fleming. A c...

Every now and then, you come across something in literature that makes you stop and wonder. If it’s a ‘classic’ you’re reading, often it’s a distinctly odd p...

It ought to be possible to find lots of Lee Child novels at car boot sales and charity shops. After all, he has millions of fans. (For those few not in the k...

Lately, I’ve been trying to work out a way of advertising my books on Facebook. I’m not naturally a very sociable sort of person. Don’t get me wrong: I like ...

Private Eye’s “Bookworm” described Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom, as too domestic to be great. Or words to that effect. I didn’t keep the review, an...

Some readers may be familiar with a US website called The Art of Manliness, devoted to all things gentlemanly. A couple of years ago, two of its contributors...