Metroland is divided into three sections. In the first section, we meet Toni and Chris as schoolboys who share a devotion to the intangible values of art, and a constant desire to ‘épater le bourgeois ...

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...

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 ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

How naïve we were in the mid-1950s. We saw Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues standing on the great Tien An Men Gate reviewing the masses and wrote of the comradeship of those who had endured the Long ...

Once you unstop your ears to its music, the siren song of the American road is hard to resist. I made my first coast-to-coast drive at the age of nineteen, setting out with a friend in my battered ...

As the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, President Trump has spread anti-Americanism more widely than at any time since the Vietnam War. Fifty years ago, Sarah ...

Ulrikka S Gernes’s debut novel, A Girl Left the Room, was published to huge acclaim in Denmark in 2024. It begins with a moth trapped in a train carriage. The protagonist, Tanja, captures it tenderly ...

Of all the dominant actors on the mid-19th-century scene, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the most charismatic and divisive. Admittedly he had nothing of that physique du rôle which a nation ...

British public life is sustained by a series of comforting delusions – as became very clear to me during five years writing leaders for a national newspaper, trying to reconcile the stories the ...

Buffs of Catcher In The Rye will remember that novel's test of a good novel: if reading it makes you want to telephone the writer like a friend. Holden Caulfield, at large in the universe of the ...