Books Soldiers in love Men at War, Luke Turner’s tender account of servicemen’s transgressive private lives, transforms our understanding of the Second World War. By Erica Wagner
Books Hilary Mantel’s death is an incalculable loss to our national life and literature By Erica Wagner
Salman Rushdie shows us that free speech is life itself Rushdie knows how vital, how serious the business of storytelling is. Yet in my encounters with him he never… By Erica Wagner
How TS Eliot found happiness Withdrawn and prejudiced, the poet is hard to warm to – but Robert Crawford’s new biography shows how Eliot’s… By Erica Wagner
The rise and fall of the literary bloke John Walsh’s excitable account of carousing with Martin Amis and other “big beasts” of the Eighties is a paean… By Erica Wagner
Erica Wagner: The ghost stories that haunted my childhood A book – a hardback, bound in clear plastic – which I read, and then read again, feeling that… By Erica Wagner
Reimagining Beowulf as a story of female rage Maria Dahvana Headley’s thrilling feminist translation brings the epic Anglo-Saxon poem into the present political moment. By Erica Wagner
Everyone and no one belongs to New York Two new books capture the resilient spirit of New York City – and the people who call it home. By Erica Wagner
Remembering Anthony Thwaite The life and legacy of the poet and New Statesman literary editor, who has died at the age of… By Erica Wagner
Philip Roth and the repellent What is most disturbing in Blake Bailey’s biography is not Roth’s behaviour, but his biographer’s apparently unthinking alignment with… By Erica Wagner