English Literature
The ascent of Barbara Pym
A chronicler of the overlooked, she has at last got her just literary deserts
Must we mourn a decline in English degrees?
It does not entail the decline of English literature
Canterbury Tales redux
Pilgrimage still serves to bring people together
Harold Pinter: from bad to verse
The playwright will not be remembered for his poetry
Why do we like Larkin so much?
On a love with limits
Virginia Woolf: Teflon goddess of the trivial
She was nasty, crude, racist and often a poor writer — so why is she revered?
Why we need a new movement
The timid world of BritLit needs to be shaken up by a mutinous new clique of writers
Keep calm and le Carré on
His pessimism about Britain proved untrue — and its own kind of comforting fantasy
A spy for all seasons
Who is the man behind “The IPCRESS File”?
Literature’s year zero
One hundred years ago two literary masterpieces changed the literary world forever
The brighter side of German Expressionism
The expressionists breathed fresh life into familiar subjects
Off to the races
The slow motion car crash continues
A neglected radical
Guillaume Guillon-Lethière was an artistic and social pioneer
When breast isn’t best
A major maternity support group is at war with its trustees over its insistence that men should be enabled to breastfeed
45 seconds to midnight
Say what you will of nuclear war but at least, unlike this election, it’s mercifully brief
The BBC can be a drag
The priorities of its reporting, especially on gender issues, can be absurd
The football world’s war on free speech
Football authorities are attempting to insist on what political values players and supporters should represent
The Turner Prize’s identity crisis
The art establishment has revived competent drawing in spite of itself
The Just Stop Oil sentences were just
Direct action protestors are not immune from the operation of the law
Word pictures at a gallery
Paintings are appreciated best when there are few people around to spoil the view
Infected blood and infected institutions
Decades on from the beginning of the infected blood scandal, our institutions still fail to align themselves with the truth
