Real-life Charles Dickens characters traced
Historian finds many of literature's best-known names in the London streets of Dickens's teenage yearsBill Sikes and Scrooge are among the most well-known characters in English literature but rather than being figments of Charles Dickens's imagination,...
The Cruise of the Rolling Junk by F Scott Fitzgerald – review
F Scott Fitzgerald's picaresque memoir reflects the American obsession with the automobileIn the summer of 1920, F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, three months married, decided to flee the ennui of the New England noon, and so they fired up their dilapidat...
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend – review
Anna Trench welcomes a 30th anniversary edition for Sue Townsend's enduring comic creation"Perhaps when I am famous and my diary is discovered people will understand the torment of being a 13¾ -year-old undiscovered intellectual," writes Adrian Mole o...
My father’s Great Expectations
As a boy, Michael Rosen used to sit spellbound on holiday while his father read from Dickens and brought Pip, Miss Havisham and Magwitch vividly to life. Fifty years on, the tale still resonates as it merges with his own family's journey out of poverty...
Winter read: The Midnight Bell by Patrick Hamilton
The pub at the centre of Patrick Hamilton's The Midnight Bell is the perfect haven on a winter's eveningOn the face of it the first instalment in Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky trilogy, The Midnight Bell, might not seem an o...
The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt
A flawed but dazzling study of the origins of the renaissanceIn the winter of 1417 the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius's De Reru...
Gallery: Great Expectations: manuscript of Dickens’s genius
The manuscript of Great Expectations, full of crossings out and emendations, shows Dickens's genius at work. The editor of a new facsimile edition, Caroline Murray, guides us through from dedication to happy ending
Serious questions about the standard of modern literary discussion
Would contemporary authors relish the daunting seriousness of a schoolboy questionnaire, sent to 150 leading authors in 1963?Many a contemporary author, weary of the trivialising attentions of the modern media, dreams fondly of an age of higher serious...
A Simple Story by Leonardo Sciascia – review
Leonardo Sciascia is by turns polemic and playful in this brace of short storiesNovelist, essayist and radical politician Leonardo Sciascia was known during his lifetime as the "conscience of Italy" for his unflinching censure of Italian society, its l...
The Campus Trilogy by David Lodge – review
David Lodge's trilogy of novels about a fictional English university are solidly crafted pieces of comedy, the last oddly prescient about academic life and British societyDavid Lodge's three solidly crafted comic novels of academic life, compiled here ...
My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose, translated by Arunava Sinha – review
Buddhadeva Bose's story in which men waiting for a train recall their past loves loses something in translationOne of Bengal's foremost writers of the 20th century – widely considered second only to Rabindranath Tagore – Buddhadeva Bose produced mo...
