Dickens, Browning and Lear: what’s in a reputation?
The bicentenaries of three great Victorian writers underline the capricious nature of literary afterlivesWhat are the qualities that make a writer endure and flourish? It's an intriguing question whose answer includes luck, good timing and the mysterio...
Want a bestseller? Write about Henry or Hitler…
From Tudor England to the Third Reich, history's megalomaniacs continue to make great literary fodderWhat is it about Henry VIII? Shakespeare tiptoed warily round the subject but English writers and readers ever since have been addicted to his charisma...
The Marlowe Papers: playing poetically with the playwright’s murder
Literary dialogue comes in many forms – webs of allusion, reference and literary homage. And Ros Barber's new novel The Marlowe Papers takes this conversation to another levelOne of the secret pleasures of reading is watching books and writers talk t...
Where are today’s literary nomads?
Writers such as George Orwell and Henry Miller explored deprivation and exigency. Where are their modern counterparts?Whatever happened to the garret and the gutter? The great literary boom of 1980 to 2010 is over. Prices are collapsing, and the winds ...
10 best first lines in fiction
Gallery: The greatest opening lines of novels in the English language, from Austen to JoyceRobert McCrum
Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer by Frederick Turner – review
Henry Miller found his spiritual home in 1930s ParisThe shabby, 38-year-old American who arrived on the Left Bank in 1930 with a copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and the manuscripts of two unpublished novels in his suitcase, was the quintessence of a...
Wooden spoon
As the fuss surrounding the Pulitzer and Orwell prizes shows, book awards are increasingly more about hype than substanceThe great literary boom of 1980 to 2010 is over, but its glittering prizes still linger, like discarded party favours the morning a...
Don’t read the last rites for hardbacks just yet
Sales figures show that, though paperbacks are all but history, hardbacks look surprisingly healthyOn the readers' highway through the world of books, next to stunning vistas of the imagination, you also pass the burnt-out wrecks of shiny new predictio...
Pulitzer should take a leaf out of the Orange prize’s book
A rickety shortlist doomed Pulitzer judges' attempts to award a fiction prize this year – they should see how the Orange prize does itThe news that this year's Pulitzer prize, one of the premier US literary trophies, now in its 96th year, decided no...
Read the book? Now see the live show
Robert McCrum attends a book slam – and sees the future of publishingLast week I went to a book slam in Battersea, south London. Pioneered eight years ago by the novelist Patrick Neate, Book Slam describes itself as "London's leading literary shindig...
Why reading aloud makes a book so much better
Aspiring authors should be taught to read before they are allowed to writeAs a result of the Dickens bicentenary, I have been listening to the unabridged Naxos recording of David Copperfield read by Nicholas Boulton. Dickens of course was a great reade...
Waterstones boss poised to join e-reader battle