Ever since Ibsen’s Nora walked out of the “doll’s house”, literature has been questioning marriage and patriarchy. Many of the greatest novels, plays and films we have revolve around the consequences of wives choosing adultery over convention. The price for 19th-century heroines,...
One thing that many adult readers find when we encounter modern literature is how seldom it gives us the momentum and sense of wonder we found in books when we were children. Where are the vivid characters, the adventures, the...
The phenomenon by which groups of animals all suddenly begin to copy a new behaviour – like blue-tits learning to open milk bottle tops – has been termed morphic resonance. Something very similar to the blue-tits’ discovery has recently been...
If you were to ask what place in Britain has inspired most writers, you would probably guess London; Devon comes a close second. So many authors past and present have been drawn to (and have drawn on) the county that...
“I love England in a heat-wave” says Leon Tallis in Ian McEwan;’s Atonement, “It’s a different country. All the rules change.” As the summer of 2018 continues to break records for its prolonged absence of rain (last month was the...
Cold, magic, adventure, family, comedy, fires in the dark – we all know what makes for a wonderful Christmas story. The bulging sack of children’s books could cause Santa’s sleigh to sink. Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton’s deliciously droll Emily...
If you have seen recent films Dunkirk or Darkest Hour, you’d be forgiven for thinking that World War Two was a struggle in which half the human race was missing. Its soldiers and strategists, politicians and prisoners, workers and wounded are all men,...
When Michael Franks won the annual Wingate Prize yesterday for his memoir the Mighty Franks, a dazzling portrait of an eccentric Los Angeles family, it set the seal on what looks to be an annus mirabilis for a new kind of heroine....
“Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.” If I had to trace the death of the novel – or at least a prolonged attempt to kill it – to a single phrase, this is it. EM Forster wrote...
Few readers will fail to spot this has been a golden year for children’s books. With Philip Pullman’s magisterial return to the world of His Dark Materials in La Belle Sauvage, and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s rapturously received nature-fest The Lost...