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 abo...

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

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

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

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...

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

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...

“When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the reso...

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

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

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

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’...

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 th...

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 g...

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...

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...