The joys and misery of Monica
This is not only an objective biography by a distinguished academic, it is also a warm personal memoir
Like father, like son
Philip Larkin’s long association with Kingsley and Martin Amis resulted in the poet being misrepresented and misunderstood
Sharing the pleasure in poetry
James Booth reviews ‘Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin’
Feminist rehab for mean girl Mahler
You’d have thought the Head Muse of old Vienna had enough on her plate
Get smartphones out of school
Young people desperately need a break from social media
The expensive problem with the minimum wage
Higher wages for some, perhaps, but joblessness for others
The US city on the banks of the Thames
Critics don’t care for Canary Wharf, considering it a monument of 1980s corporatism
The age of reason, sliced and diced
No historian wields Ockham’s razor more effectively than J.C.D. Clark
Getting the creeps
How should we cope with the unsettling in everyday life?
October letters
Misquoting Shakespeare and a rounded sense of humour
Bursting the myth of the “people’s war”
The Home Guard was not a nation-in-arms of the Jacobin kind
The big picture
A story of modern Britain, a moral tale, of venality, hubris and fraud
The dangerous lure of Europe
We must disincentivise economic migration to European states
Lightweight Kate Winslet
Our most versatile of English roses must accept that one role is beyond even her
