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Byline: JOHN SUTHERLAND Correction Appended THE WRITTEN WORLD The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization By Martin Puchner Illustrated. 412 pp. Random House. $32. THE SOCIAL LIFE OF [...]

Byline: JOHN SUTHERLAND Living on Paper. Letters From Iris Murdoch 1934-1995. Edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe.Illustrated. 666 pages. Princeton University Press. $39.95. At 17, Iris Murdoch was asked [...]

Byline: JOHN SUTHERLAND As one despairing biographer put it: 'We shall never know anything about Wilkie Collins other than his dates of birth and death.' The tombstone in Kensal Green [...]

Byline: John Sutherland My dilemma at this time of year, as I packed my bags for the annual trip to the sun, used to be: 'What book shall I jam [...]

Byline: JOHN SUTHERLAND RIGHT FIELD At 11.15 on Tuesday there will be a celebratory wreath-laying at the resting place of the most famous novelist our country can boast. And when [...]

Byline: JOHN SUTHERLAND The novelist John Irving is holding Our Mutual Friend back for his deathbed read. So too is Desmond, in the cult TV series, Lost. It's a wise [...]

Book title in here BY NAME NAME PUBLISHER, pounds XX.XX, XXX pp T pounds XX.XX ( pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4115 Why do we care about bestseller lists? They [...]

Question: what was the most popular novel in the American Civil War? Automatically, one hazards Uncle Tom's Cabin - recalling Abraham Lincoln's shaking the hand of 'the little woman who [...]

The book prize jamborees never stop. The first major literary gong of the New Year - the Costa award - will be doled out on the 22nd and the panel [...]

I was lunching with a senior editor at one of the great classic reprint lines. I asked which titles sold year in year out. The usual suspects, of course: Pride [...]

Like El Cid, as immortalised on screen by Charlton Heston, writers sometimes ride out after death, to win a literary battle or two. The website www.allbookstores.com lists some 200 authors [...]

I always experience a spasm of warmth when I see Jasper Fforde's name in the lists or, as is currently the case, on Waterstone's '3 for 2' tables. Go, Jasper, [...]

The thug hero goes back - long past Captain Meadows Taylor (who introduced the term into popular parlance, with his Confessions of a Thug, in 1839) to Beowulf and, doubtless, [...]

On Thursday 4 May, the 10 pretenders for their party's presidential nomination participated in a televised debate in the Reagan Library, in California's Simi Valley: the shrine of New Republicanism. [...]

The book that has most shaken the modern world, and continues to shake it (thank you, Dr Dawkins), is The Origin of Species. Science, philosophy and political books can do [...]

Every so often a novel comes along which precisely defines what the form can and can't do, legally, at this particular moment in history. Think Madame Bovary in 1857, The [...]

What could be a highly informative trial opened in Los Angeles at the beginning of the month. On one side, the bestselling novelist, Clive Cussler. On the other side, Crusader [...]

London's Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Avenue is, as its name promises, a resort for free spirits. A New Curiosity Shop, as a new Boz might put it. But not cheap. [...]

Fiction, like football, has its fans. And, like the beautiful game, it couldn't do without their loyal support. The word is derives from is 'fanatic'. We, too, have our novels [...]

Listing to starboard, listing to port: the Good Ship English Literature is listing every bloody where. Barely have we mastered Waterstone's and the Observer's list of the 100 greatest novels [...]

The London Library sardonically shelves its copy of Colin Wilson's The Outsider on the 'Genius' shelf, between 'Gas' and 'Geology'. There is, alas, no adjoining 'Guff' section - although that [...]

If there were a Nobel Prize for the most successful creative writing class ever, it would have to go to that held at the Villa Diodati, in Switzerland, in the [...]

'Who reads e-books?' asked a perplexed article in USA Today, a couple of years ago. It's still a good question and 'very few people' is still a good answer. A [...]

The New York Times fiction bestseller lists tend to make sorry reading for British eyes nowadays. Among the 30 titles listed on May 14, for example, there was just one [...]

What precedents, I asked a copyright-lawyer friend, did she think The Da Vinci Code legal case would create? Not many, she thought. She anticipated more shockwaves from another case - [...]

There are few reasons for feeling any gratitude towards David Irving as he sits, 23 hours a day (as he complains), alone in his Austrian cell. But, odious as his [...]

In the unregulated hothouse which is the Internet, new literary life forms appear and change at the speed at which fruit flies mutate. Among the fastest growing - and changing [...]

Oliver Twist, like Don Quixote, is a novel which more people know than have ever read. 'Please, sir, I want some more'' is, like the mad hidalgo tilting at windmills, [...]

Byline: John Sutherland `Literary mystique', like feminine mystique, is unfairly distributed. Some of them have 'it', some don't. No group of writers (with the possible exception of the Beats) had [...]