Sylvia Townsend Warner’s obscure forces
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, published a century ago, is a powerful reverie on women’s interwar status
ByLiterature
Immerse yourself in the captivating world of literature with our collection of articles, offering literary analysis, book recommendations, author spotlights, and thought-provoking discussions that celebrate the written word.
The highs and lows of London’s literary scene
Also: a dreamy new novel, and my relapse
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How not to read JG Ballard
This new biography has done a great writer a disservice
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Ben Lerner has taken autofiction somewhere new
The American novelist’s new book is not truly about ego, or technology, but a more elusive and universal theme
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Franz Kafka’s ten apostles
The Mitteleuropean writer owes much of his fame to the gifted translators who took his words out of German and…
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The curse of individualism
Rowan Williams’s new book reimagines solidarity for our times
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My mother’s love for words
As a child, Marie Drabble would read anything that was printed, from adverts to lists. It was a habit that…
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Len Deighton was a revolutionary
Too many of Britain’s espionage writers were melancholy public schoolboys – Deighton was their antidote
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How academics ruined Shakespeare
It is time to retrieve the playwright we thought we knew – the man who asks universal questions – from…
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The depravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s reading list
The Epstein emails are crawling with Humbert Humberts
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How Wuthering Heights seduced its readers
Nothing beats the thrills and seductions of Emily Brontë’s novel
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Hamnet fails Shakespeare
Paul Mescal’s portrayal leans more on grief than genius
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From the archive: Mr Eliot’s poems
1926: How TS Eliot’s “music of ideas” saved a generation
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TS Eliot’s Hollow Men are all around us
The poem, which was published 100 years ago, has beguiled a remarkable array of minds
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DH Lawrence and the superiority of fiction
The Goldsmiths Prize Lecture on 100 years of the writer’s seminal essay “Why the Novel Matters”
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Reluctant Cheats: a story by Anton Chekhov
In this short story, appearing in English for the first time, New Year’s party guests battle against time
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Never recommend Philip Roth to your mother
Her face was a mask of horror
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Iris Murdoch’s poems were better left in the attic
A cache of newly unearthed works is not the “thrilling literary discovery” their publisher claims
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The real crisis of literacy – we’re reading too much
In the age of AI, with its blizzard of words, we should relish our pre-linguistic sensibilities
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David Szalay: “I think of myself as a European novelist”
The Booker Prize winner on masculinity, sex and what Keir Starmer should read
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