Novels
Giles Treadwell
Old-style literary agent
The story of a lifetime
Whole life novels lay bare the randomness and haphazardness of life
A man adrift
Flesh, by David Szalay, is not radically masculine but quietly humanist
Murders for October
Brazil in the 1930s, France in the 1940s and Britain in the 1950s
Murders for July
My murder of the month is The Other Couple by Diane Jeffrey
A story of doublings
If you want to understand how the world works now, read a classic
Emma Booster
Her novels occupy the curious, contested space that stretches between literary fiction and commercial romance
A writer we should all read
There is only one way for a writer to escape: to release experience into prose
Booker candidates … and also-rans
The measure of a novel is not its ideas but how it animates those ideas
Snapshots of a strong and silent type
Amid brands and trends, how do we identify the good stuff?
Most Read
The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
Stop ignoring the Islamisation of our democracy
The British state is bending to Islamism, not attempting to defeat it
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
No bullshit government
Tom Jones grills the shadow minister for
policy renewal about the plans of a
future Tory administration
Hey, Starmer, leave those kids alone
Banning under-16s from social media is more prohibitionist stupidity
Venice Biennale 2026
Collected detritus of Biennales past, left available for recycling when there’s space to fill
The radical feminism—Christianity pipeline
For radical feminists, clarity about the realities of sex often opens onto a search for moral order
Farewell to a gentle jazz-lover
Scholarship trumps zealotry, particularly when it is veiled by modesty
The underworld on the high street
Beneath the façade of everyday commerce, organised crime has quietly captured British high streets
Warm home, wrong decision
Ministers are once again choosing the most politically convenient response to rising energy costs, not the most effective one
Hey, leftists, leave independent schools alone
The campaign against independent schools is irrational, short-sighted and destructive
How Donald Trump betrayed himself
President Trump has forgotten what made him successful in the first place
The case against Project Spire
The Church of England should abandon this misleading and expensive exercise in virtue signalling
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define