Despite Victoria Beckham's pioneering example (she famously told the Spanish magazine Chic that she'd never read a book), the fashion for not reading has yet to take off. This is a shame, because, as a university teacher and a reviewer, I am required to talk about books that I haven't read (or haven't quite read) almost every day. There's a vast discrepancy between what academics appear to have read and [...]

Early in his book, Peter Gay offers an account of the work of James Ensor, "probably among the best known" of the Belgian modernists. Born in 1860, Ensor specialised in a form of kitsch grotesque, with a particular fondness for skeletons:

One . . . is comfortably ensconsed in an upholstered easy chair glancing at Chinese objects; another is sketching; still another is playing a clarinet. He shows oddly [...]

Near the end of his latest collection, Geoffrey Hill seems to get entangled:

Shredded - my kite - in the myriad-snaggedcrabapple crown, the cane cross-piece flailing;a dark wind visible even deep in the hedge.I knew then how much my eros was emptiness, thorn-fixed on desolation, as rain rode up Severn and we, on high groundeastward, scarped and broke it, like somebeleagueredfolk [...]

Whether she's discussing demographics, campus massacres or late-term abortions, the journalist and novelist Lionel Shriver always sounds pretty sure of herself. From time to time, though, regular readers of her Guardian column might notice some conflicts. Beneath the surface stridency, there's a tendency to pull off the odd rhetorical switcheroo. One moment Shriver is the über "anti-mom", hailing the pleasures of childlessness; the next she's urging British women to get [...]

To say that the action of Graham Swift's latest novel is mostly horizontal might give the wrong impression. Tomorrow is set in a double bed, but the springs are squeaking through restlessness, not passion. While her husband and children lie asleep, art dealer Paula Hook is thinking about the day that is to come. Something will be revealed, the back cover promises, that "will redefine all their lives". It's her [...]

Following the fate of the Palmer family, Derek Johns's accomplished debut begins at the end of an Indian summer. Jim and Margaret have recently moved with their two children to the city of Wells. Jim, formerly the owner of a successful car showroom, has made a series of bad financial decisions resulting in his bankruptcy. A few months ago he was discussing XK150 dropheads and wondering where to flash his [...]

One wet morning in Arlington Park, Juliet Randall, the heroine of Rachel Cusk's latest novel, wakes up with a bug. She "parted her hair and there it was: a thing like a cockroach, three inches long and two across, embedded in her scalp, waving its legs triumphantly . . . Oh, how it itched! How revolting it was, how unbearably revolting! Was there no way of getting it out?" It [...]

Late in their marriage, Thomas Hardy's first wife took up cycling. It was a fashionable pursuit at the time, but Emma Hardy must have cut a ludicrous figure, Ralph Pite remarks, "charging along on her bicycle with a small, frail man trailing in her wake". The man was her husband Thomas - who was, as he wrote to a friend, "trying frantically to overtake her".

The scene is wonderfully chosen [...]

Jenny Diski isn't a natural travel writer. The issue is not so much the writing as the travelling. The cover of her latest collection of essays captures the problem. It's not a very clear shot. The hunched sleigh driver, silhouetted against a snowy landscape, could be just about anyone. But the uncertain posture gives her away. This is Diski in transit in Lapland, and movement just isn't her thing. "Nothing [...]

''Misfortune," Brian Dillon writes, "finds new and inventive forms." In In the Dark Room, the literary critic and academic turns semi-Proustian, reforming his unhappy childhood into a gripping catalogue of the ways in which we remember our past. Much of this is painful. Both Dillon's parents died before he was 18, his mother after suffering from scleroderma, a debilitating skin condition. The memoir opens with him recalling packing his bags, [...]