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Will Will Self Viking, 40opp, 14.99 [pounds sterling] The metaphysics begin with the dust-jacket: a big black 'Will'. Underneath, an almost invisibly white 'Self'. They are divided by a photograph [...]

Booker is 40. It now ranks as Britain's second oldest national fiction prize. Pride of place in that league goes to the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, an annual award [...]

What do the following four books have in common? 1) Arthur & George, 2) Schott's Original Miscellany, 3) The Dangerous Book for Boys, and 4) The Glass Books of the [...]

In September 2000, when Salman Rushdie announced his intention to leave for New York, he complained about the 'bitchiness' of the London literary world. A few weeks ago, an expatriated [...]

In 1968 (heady year), a colleague and I wrote to Penguin Books. Would they, we politely inquired, like an edition of The Way We Live Now? The firm had just [...]

Stop the Clocks: Thoughts on What I Leave Behind Joan Bake well Virago, 296pp, 18.99 £ Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter Diana Athill Granta Books, 168pp, 12.99 [...]

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget Sarah Hepola Two Roads, 240pp. 12.99 £ Pour Me: a Life A A Gill Weidenfeld iT Nicolson, 256pp. 20 £ Blackouts as [...]

That's the Way It Crumbles: the American Conquest of English Matthew Engel Profile Books, 279pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling] Perhaps, with the ascension of Ruth Davidson to political superstardom and the [...]

I'm one of the shrinking number of Britons who can remember, with a distant thrill, the question: 'And do ya have an embarrassin' moment to share wi' us?' Wilfred Pickles, [...]

On 23 November, Philip Hammond delivered a rather Schopenhauerian Budget forecast. 'Broke' did not begin to describe it. We were in the soup. One cause--Brexit--is tractable, at least notionally, if [...]

The Pelican book rises from the ashes this month. Why, one wonders, exhume a series that honourably ran its near-50-year course, fading out in the 1980s? One reason suggests itself--agglomeration. [...]

The 'family Christmas' was institutionalised by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. The Christmas ghost story was institutionalised around the same time by Charles Dickens, who had realised the market value [...]

Lion Heart Justin Cartwright Bloomsbury,335pp, [pounds sterling]18.99 Expo 58 Jonathan Coe Viking, 288pp, [pounds sterling]16.99 One of the few things that makes life bearable nowadays is that we have so [...]

Alexandria: the Last Nights of Cleopatra Peter Stothard Granta Books, 402pp, [pounds sterling]25 Call them mortuary memoirs. Granta Books, Alexandria's publisher, had a success in 2004 with The Smoking Diaries [...]

British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-60 James Smith Cambridge University Press, 226pp, £55 The most hated person in Britain, George Orwell believed, is the nosy parker. M15 is the state-appointed [...]

The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives In the Second World War Lara Feigel Bloomsbury, 528pp, £25 The academic industry has recently put a great deal of energy into reshaping what [...]

An Almost English Life: literary and Not So Literary Recollections Miriam Gross Short Books, 256pp, £12.99 Labelled a 'short book', this memoir has the quality of a long conversation with [...]

The late Karl Miller was less a literary editor and more a conductor. He wielded his baton with the authority of a maestro, writes John Sutherland I got a phone [...]

On one side of the 'gr8 db8' stands valiant David: the author--one is told--of a hundred books. He speaks for the motion that 'texting is the latest manifestation of the [...]

On Beauty Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, 464pp, £16.99 In her 'acknowledgements', Zadie Smith informs us: 'It should be obvious from the first line that this is a novel inspired by [...]

Shakespeare: the biography Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus, 546pp, £25 This is the third big biography of Shakespeare to appear in the past year, following hard on Stephen Greenblatt's bestselling [...]

One of the few consolations in coming to the end of a full career of 40 years is that one can look back to perceive long rhythms in one's profession. [...]

Bestseller lists began in the United States in the 1890s. They were introduced over here, foot-draggingly ('damned Yankee things'), in 1974. Since then, with cultural globalisation, Anglo-American taste in very [...]

The novel can do many things. But rarely can it do them quickly. It takes too long to write, to manufacture, to distribute. As such, the political novel, in our […]

The Iraq War has dragged on longer than the Second World War. Soldiers' reportage never caught up with that conflict. Letters were censored; mail deliveries were slow. Norman Mailer's The […]

To the mortification, doubtless, of its literary editor, for the past six months the New York Times bestseller list has prominently featured Kevin Trudeau's The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't […]

When my son enrolled in junior school, among his first assignments was to learn by heart the capitals of all 50 states of the Union. Harder than it would seem, […]

The UK and US are two countries divided by a common book--or Book. In the UK, the 'authorised' King James Bible has, since its publication in 1611, remained the protected [...]

Nothing measures more precisely the gulf between the two great English-speaking communities than the word they use for their closest family member. Whether you say Mom/Mommy or Mum/Mummy distinguishes two […]

'Artists,' Ezra Pound declared, 'are the antennae of the race.' If so, it is the novelists among them who best foretell the political future. Aged 67, Anthony Trollope, the workhorse […]

In 1935, two young publishers, one American, one English, hit on the same brilliant idea. Why not sell next-to-new books, in soft covers, at near-giveaway prices, and call them 'paperbacks'? […]

Few novels have a significant social impact half a century after publication. But one 50-year-old book informs every utterance of that grand panjandrum of the American economy and lifelong 'objectivist' […]

In 1947, MGM thought it might film Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and invited the crusty author to Los Angeles. No film was forthcoming, but Waugh's sojourn in the sun inspired [...]

It's the season of London literary parties. Next time you're at one, and conversation flags, try kick-starting it with the following questions: 'What do you make of the National Book [...]

If Haiti could take a patent out on the zombie concept (as George Lucas has on Ewoks), that sad island's economic woes would be solved at a stroke. Zombies are [...]

Over the past five years, a long collective howl of pain has interrupted the habitual calm of the American campus. It emanates principally from arts and humanities professors. You can't [...]

James Gillray's Plumb-Pudding in Danger is a cartoon lodged in many minds. It caricatures a ravenous Pitt and Napoleon carving up the globe in 1793-an image for what happens after [...]

Genres mushroom up so fast in the superheated (and dung-rich) soil of the book world that it's a job finding names for them. Recent arrivals include Me-moirs (think Vic Reeves), [...]

The superstores that have revolutionised the US book trade proudly proclaim themselves to be 'as large as public libraries'. Like libraries, they have a distinct sociology. Students sit for hours [...]

A poll three months ago by the ABC network confirmed that American faith is holding firm: 80 per cent of the population believe in heaven and, of those, 85 per [...]

One of the ways to make money in the US book trade is to publish books about ways to make money. The bestseller lists invariably feature a crop of this [...]

The international departure lounge is one of the few places, nowadays, where customers have time to browse and where books are guaranteed to sell. Not surprisingly, publishers fight hard for [...]

To the casual eye, the current British and American book trades look as similar as peas in a pod. In fact, they have always operated in strikingly different ways. Stabilised [...]

It is a moot point whether Americans take books more seriously than the British. What is undeniable is that they take the actual writing of books more seriously. Would-be authors [...]

A sure way of gauging the contrasts between different countries literary scenes is to look at their literary prizes. The Goncourt, with its paltry teneuro winner's purse, expresses a haughty [...]

Bestseller lists should more properly be called 'fastseller lists'--or, perhaps, 'hot-cake lists'. What they have recorded, since their invention 110 years ago (in America, of course), is titles that fly [...]

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of being arrested for being drunk, and shares his odd admiration for Scientology.

The author discusses the change within the British university system which has marginalised a historic focus on the core discipline of English studies. Topics include the implementation of the research assessment exercise (RAE) and the teaching quality assessment (TQA) by the English government in the 1970s, the benefits and drawbacks of implementing an objective qualification system for judging universities, and the effect of undergraduate fees on English university students.

In this article the author discusses the Mormon religion in light of the 2008 U.S. presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. He notes that Mormonism is not a religion well-understood among non-believers. He examines the influence of Mormonism on science fiction author Orson Scott Card.