Pity the head that wears the Laureateship. The current incumbent of that most curious office, paid in wine and brickbats, has described how ‘the job has been very, very damaging to my...
Deyan Sudjic is the director of the Design Museum and this is his dense introduction to the world of objects: a potted history of design and an exploration of the way that it influences our...
2008: Catherine sits on the steps outside her cousin’s house in Edinburgh thinking back to the summer of 1981, when her cousins, Rosa and Sam, and their widowed mother came to stay with...
The Tudors are all the rage at the moment. Not only have we been treated to ten weeks of Jonathan Rhys Meyers prancing and pouting as Henry VIII in the lavish BBC series, but now the ubiquitous...
In the opening pages of ‘The First Person’, Ali Smith’s latest collection of tales, the narrator overhears a debate on the nature of short stories. The discussion eventually...
When Tove Jansson started producing ‘Moomin’ cartoon strips in the mid-1950s, she did so with the readers of the London Evening News in mind. Although she had been writing prose about...
Death and sex: the two staples of music from folk to rap. It’s no coincidence that Malcolm McLaren, that arch manipulator of public taste, chose to call his band the Sex Pistols. It’s...
Deformed like his father by a hare lip, embryologist Dr Victor Hoppe wants to beat God at his own game. An abrupt departure from the University of Aachen returns him to his childhood village,...
‘A Whispered Name’ sees the return of William Brodrick’s Father Anselm, the Gilbertine monk/investigator and protagonist of the Richard and Judy bestseller ‘The Sixth...
Striding up the leafy trail set by ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ and ‘Our Lady of the Forest’, David Guterson further stakes his literary claim on the rugged borderlands of the...
