London in 1984 was a city of crumbling council estates, gleaming dockside developments, radical music festivals, antiracist protests and police violence. It was not a single capital city, Stephen ...

Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, a Comedy follows a woman over the course of a day during her stay in an artist’s retreat. The woman doesn’t use the term “artist’s retreat”, but she does call the ...

Recommending that readers start a book by skipping from its beginning to its end is an unusual thing to do, but then Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography of Piet Mondrian is not a usual book. Its ...

Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam is a series of impossible elegies. The poems respond to the recovery from the River Thames in 2001 of the torso of a Black boy, named Adam by police officers. The unknown child ...

“People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what’s the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.” Dorothy Parker has the fortune to be remembered as young – as ...

“I beg you to send me immediately the remaining Vols:”, Henry Fielding wrote to Samuel Richardson in October 1748. Fielding was requesting the final volumes of Clarissa; or, The History of a Young ...

It is a courageous soul who would take on the challenge of writing a Life (even a partial Life) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The man lived a long time for his era, from 1646 to 1716. That is seventy ...

Recipes can take many forms, from detailed sets of instructions to simple lists. Stuck to my refrigerator is a carefully laminated card containing my sister-in-law’s guide (in French) to making ...

Green-Templeton College, Woodstock Road, Oxford. Sir, – I met the late Eric Korn by chance at an Antiquarian Book Fair in New York in the late 1980s. When I saw his nametag I asked if he was the TLS ...