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Graham Greene hated interviews. He granted one in 1968 to BBC television (his brother, Hugh Carleton Greene, was then director-general) but made two stipulations: the interview should take place on [...]

This bulky, wilfully miscellaneous but addictively readable volume contains a selection of Simon Schama's 'occasional writings' from sources as diverse as The New Yorker, The Guardian, The LRB and The [...]

Iam not an American,' Mark Twain once proclaimed, 'I am the American.' He had good warrant for saying so. Of all the nation's writers he is still considered the greatest [...]

If he had lived today, Thomas De Quincey, a life-long abuser of Class A drugs, might have been too busy keeping out of the clutches of the law to have [...]

The first volume of The Letters of TS Eliot appeared in 1988, 23 years after his death. The correspondence published in that volume brought the biographical record up to 1922, [...]

On Thursday, when the London Review of Books - 'the most extraordinary journal of its time' (Tom Paulin), 'the house magazine of the intellectual elite' (Clive James), and 'the largest [...]

In 1999, I was a judge when JM Coetzee won his second Man Booker prize, for Disgrace . He didn't turn up to collect his award, any more than when [...]

Unlikely as it seems, when the Ultimate History of the Codex Book is written, 'Schwarzenegger' may be in the index along with 'Gutenberg'. The decision in June by California's governor [...]

It's always fascinating to see a new genre emerge out of the seething brew of British fiction. Turbulence bubbles up as a distinguished representative of a literary niche we don't [...]

The List On Tuesday, June 16, devotees of James Joyce's epic and endlessly debated novel Ulysses will troop into Davy Byrne's pub on Duke Street, Dublin. There they will celebrate [...]

Rana Dasgupta is described by his publicists as a 'British-Indian novelist'. He was born in Canterbury, studied at Oxford and in France and America; he has lived in many places, [...]

Wilbur Smith saw action before he wrote it, which places him in a tradition of male-action novelists from Captain Marryat, bemedalled veteran of the Napoleonic wars, to former SAS soldier [...]

Charles Dickens is the only British writer to have inspired a theme park - Dickens World, in Kent. Other writers have their festivals, their commemorative plaques, their dusty corners in [...]

Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward Ten Storey Love Song opens with the words: ''Hello,' says the wallpaper.' It's an unsettling way to start a novel. Unsettlement continues as [...]

The most enduring monuments to war are not poppies, statues in marble and bronze, or endless fields of white crosses. It is what we remember, and how we choose to [...]

Moriarty by John Gardner Quercus [pounds sterling]14.99 300 pages FT Bookshop price: [pounds sterling]11.99 John Gardner died in August last year, aged 80. His final novel, the neo-Victorian Moriarty , [...]

The epithet 'first' hangs like a lead albatross around the neck of high-achieving African-Americans: Jackie Robinson, first African-American major league baseball player of the modern era; Colin Powell, first African-American [...]

Collections of Nothing by William Davies King University of Chicago $20, 164 pages The Error World by Simon Garfield Faber [pounds sterling]14.99, 247 pages Oscar's Books by Thomas Wright Chatto [...]

The story behind Frankenstein is as gripping as the gothic fiction contained within the book's covers. On April 10 1815, in an island in far-off Indonesia, Mount Tambora erupted. The [...]

Charles Dickens would have been tickled by the idea of a novel published by an outfit called the 'Tindal Street Press, The Custard Factory, Gibb Street, Birmingham'. He would, however, [...]

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey John Murray [pounds sterling]12.99 504 pages FT Bookshop price: [pounds sterling]10.39 James Frey is, I would guess, the most sneered-at author in America. He [...]

Japan fascinates the west, partly because Japan was for so many centuries closed to the west, partly because it is so itself, so intact. Not nuclear explosion, or industrial revolution, [...]

The Widow's Secret by Brian Thompson Atlantic Books [pounds sterling]12.99, 268 pages FT Bookshop price: [pounds sterling]10.39 The Widow's Secret is a Victorian novel. Or, if one wants to be [...]

Don't call me Columbus, Freud said - he didn't discover a new world, he merely came up with a name for a condition that great writers from Sophocles onwards had [...]

My local Waterstone's bookshop is flummoxed about where to shelve Eat, Pray, Love . It could, of course, go in 'Biography' - it is, the author tells us, a 'spiritual [...]

My generation of schoolchildren and university students was marinated in Shakespeare. There was Charles Lamb's Tales at primary school; set texts at O and A level; a whole damn paper [...]

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan Cover photograph by Chris Frazer Smith Jonathan Cape 2007 Established authors have styles in cover design as recognisable as their prose styles. With Ian [...]

The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French Picador Pounds 20, 555 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 16 The subtitle of The World [...]

Amy Amy Amy: The Amy Winehouse Story by Nick Johnstone Omnibus Press Pounds 16.95, 160 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 13.56 Cleaning Up: How I Gave Up Drinking and Lived [...]

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape Pounds 18.99, 357 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 15.19 What on earth is Salman Rushdie's ninth novel about? It's not a [...]

Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi Faber Pounds 16.99, 352 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 13.59 Hanif Kureishi has written a subtle and strikingly topical novel. Its themes are [...]

How Fiction Works by James Wood Cape Pounds 12.99, 194 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 10.39 There's a lot of toolkit-lit-crit around nowadays. The reader bent on self-improvement can choose [...]

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones John Murray 2007 Cover by Peter Borner Book-jacket designers face a perennial dilemma. How information-heavy, or light, should the book's outer surfaces be? At John [...]

Let's begin with a seasonal mind game. You're the floor manager in a flagship metropolitan book store. As the customers stream in you're regarding a crate of just-arrived books for [...]

Defining Moment ''The revolution,'' we were once solemnly informed, ''will not be televised.'' It can, however, be dramatised. In August 1955, the English translation of an Irishman's French play, En [...]

Non Fiction What drove the genius behind the bonkbuster? By John Sutherland HAROLD ROBBINS: The Man who Invented Sex by Andrew Wilson Bloomsbury Pounds 16.99, 313 pages FT bookshop price: [...]

Mr Darcy*s Diary by Maya Slater Weidenfeld & Nicolson Pounds 6.99, 256 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 5.59 Literary historians will look back on 2007 as the year of Jane [...]

Non-fiction The absurd behaviour of past censors is richly entertaining - but restrictions on modern artists are not so funny. By John Sutherland Freedom's Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain by [...]

Fiction An office supplies superstore provides the bleak setting for Douglas Coupland's latest, horribly entertaining excursion into the world of modern serfs. By John Sutherland The Gum Thief by Douglas [...]

The Return of the Player by Michael Tolkin Atlantic Books Pounds 10.99, 240 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 8.79 Michael Tolkin is one of the smaller fish in the Hollywood [...]

Jane Austen for Dummies by Joan Klingel Ray Wiley Publishing Pounds 13.99, 361 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 11.19 Jane Austen's Guide to Good Manners: Compliments, Charades, and Horrible Blunders [...]

The Fourth of July by Peter de Bolla Profile Books Pounds 15.99, 196 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 12.79 Americans, unlike poets, are made, not born. Peter de Bolla, in [...]

I'm identified by the US immigration authorities as a 'resident alien': a category that hovers loosely between wet-back and citizen. I got my permit (without thinking, one stresses the word [...]

BY HOOK OR BY CROOK: A Journey in Search of English by David Crystal HarperPress Pounds 16.99, 314 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 13.59 On his deathbed, the Victorian sage [...]

APPLES by Richard Milward Faber and Faber Pounds 9.99, 208 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 7.79 Writing young is difficult. So difficult that it is usually not until a writer [...]

Hospital by Toby Litt Hamish Hamilton Pounds 14.99, 528 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 11.99 Some sense of the history and evolution of hospital-based fiction is necessary if one is [...]

In the last weeks of February 2007 the British media whipped itself into a moral panic over a rash of shootings of young black men by young black men in [...]

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee Chatto & Windus, Pounds 25, 853 pages FT bookshop price: Pounds 20 An 853-page biography is one of the most handsome compliments posterity can pay [...]