Archive
Played in a minor key
Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita
Sunny side up
Christopher Reid’s new collection, Ordinary Morning Sunlight, shows a writer at the height of his powers
The Tyranny of Family Life
Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary
A veneration of girlhood
Taylor Swift meets the scholars
Welcome back, our poet of deadlock
After a decade of silence, Tom Paulin returns with a collection full of subtle, quiet, emotional wrangles
The name’s Smiley
An affectionate return to le Carré’s best-loved character
The art of deception
Le Carré’s biographer revisits the author’s manipulative love life
Deadpan death sweats
Noah Baumbach tackles Don DeLillo’s ‘unfilmable’ postmodern classic White Noise
Tinker, tailor, lover, spy
Betrayal in the life of John le Carré
Always on their mind
Where poetry meets pop
Cathy comes home
The magnificent weirdness of Kate Bush
The spies who came back rather old
Chance discrepancies and omissions in a world where details matter
Direwolf hall
The penultimate season of the TV series Game of Thrones, and two books exploring the classical and medieval sources for the books and TV episodes
What is the Labour Party for?
The ambitionless, principled and divisive leadership of Jeremy Corbyn
Geoffrey Hill
Obituary
Smirk Host Panegyric
The poems of J. H. Prynne
Pinned to the Wall
The letters of William Gaddis
What we have
John Lanchester’s Capital
Peter Reading
Obituary
The thrill of the chase
The men behind the Duckworth–Lewis method
In a hall of mirrors
David Foster Wallace’s posthumous unfinished novel
Words of weight
The difficult poetry of J. H. Prynne
None more black
Don Paterson’s Rain
Peter Porter
Obituary
Brushed away
Glyn Maxwell’s Hide Now
Too good for Paul
Luke Haines buries Britpop
A place of casual collisions
The poetry of John Redmond
Don’t look back
The lives and tales of Mark E. Smith
All this time on my knees
Sarah Maguire spins vast webs of interconnections from close observation
Cardigan arrest
Daljit Nagra’s debut collection
Give war a chance?
Nick Cohen’s What’s Left?
The Matter of England
A review of Simon Armitage
Daddy's growling girl
The poetry of Dorothy Molloy
Slapstick torture
Keston Sutherland’s political poetry
Where have all the poets gone?
A disappointing shortlist at the 2006 T S Eliot Prize
A Writer’s Life: Glyn Maxwell
Giving a voice to the victims of 9/11
Margin of horror
The poetry of Richard Price
Making a case for ee cummings
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno’s EE Cummings
The early years of a natural, fouled-up guy
Philip Larkin’s Early Poems and Juvenilia
Voice of the Outback
An in-depth profile of and interview with the Australian poet Les Murray
Concentration, not consolation
The resistable rise of anthologies
Through the oval window
Why J. H. Prynne deserves wider acclaim
Newly dug plots
Tony Lopez’s False Memory
Repeat to fade
Peter Reading’s Collected Poems
The gospel according to Paul
Paul Auster’s Collected Prose
Plebeian poet
Jonathan Bate’s John Clare
Mild-mannered terrorists
Gordon Carr’s The Angry Brigade
Moving Voice
A profile-interview with the poet Thom Gunn
In their own words
A collection of rare recordings of some great literary figures from the British Library
Light in the Wilderness
A profile-interview with Margaret Atwood
Faithful only to poetry
Marina Tsvetaeva’s hungry years
Leaves on the tracks
Bob Dylan and the academy
Englishmen and other natives
On Roget’s Thesaurus
The Praise Singer
A profile of the poet Geoffrey Hill
Schoolgirl capers
Philip Larkin’s lesbianism
A Passionate Partisan
Ian Hamilton’s posthumous Lives of the Poets
Art of Darkness
The poetry of Robin Robertson
Injurious to truth?
A review of Censorship: A World Encyclopedia
A change of address
Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech!
Keep off the salad
Auberon Waugh’s Closing the Circle
In curious company
Philip Larkin’s prose and the critics
The poet at play
A profile of Paul Muldoon
The view from Olympia
Seamus Heaney’s Electric Light
The reclaimed land of England
An interview with Sean O’Brien
All Is Poetry
A brilliant reading of a misunderstood poet
Arrest this author
Censorship in England
Time to cough up
On keeping on smoking
Darkness at Noone
Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener
Could do better
George Walden's New Elites
Dismembering Kitty
Craig Raine's bathetic elegy, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
Avid for annotation
William Empson’s Complete Poems
Mission to destroy the Garden of Eden
Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers
Bathetic fallacies
Tony Harrison’s Laureate's Block
They’ll do anything to get you into bed
David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
The misfit manager
The short and lonely life of 'the fifth Beatle'
Smoke gets in your mind
On giving up smoking
Beyond self-help
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Below the belt
Sex and violence in Fight Club and Romance
Froth on top of bitterness
Sue Townsend’s The Cappuccino Years
The other man’s grass
Being sensible about drugs
Oedipus, king of slaves
An interview with Rita Dove
A child of acrimony
Michael Hofmann’s Approximately Nowhere
Emily hides her blushes
Emily Jenkins’s Tongue First
Life: a boozer’s manual
Drink books for Christmas
Any objections?
A history of protest
My country or a deadline
Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Big Country
This may hurt a little
Two books on masochism
Scream!
Horror as a genre
Only a notion of the nation
A pop history of England
No visible means of support
Christopher Reid’s delicate constructions
Why censors can't save us
An early call for media literacy
The anorak is empty
Nicholas Whittaker's memoir of trainspotting
Taking the Flag route
Hard-working Henry Rollins
Warlike mincing
Ray Davies’s kinked memoir
Screening Polymorphous Perversity
What horror movies tell us about ourselves
Heart and home
Andrew Motion’s The Price of Everything
While the match burns
Simon Armitage’s Book of Matches
Stand-offs with history
Tom Paulin’s Selected Poems
Peripheral fever
Nico’s final days
Cheeking the crowd
Glyn Maxwell’s brilliant second collection
At home with Peter Reading
An early interview
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