The story of Saladin has been told many times. One of the most influential portraits of the 12th-century Ayyubid sultan appeared in a work of fiction, Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825). In that ...

Lord Byron, shortly before his brief, doomed marriage to her niece Annabella Milbanke, described Elizabeth Lamb, Lady Melbourne (known to the admiring young poet as Lady M), as ‘the best friend I ever ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors. Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest ...

Since, so far as I can tell, all 5 million of the Literary Review’s readers – with the sole exception of myself – are writing/have written at least one book, they will know what I mean by ‘the myths ...

Regina Porter’s remarkable debut novel leads us on a journey through America’s mottled history, beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War and ending in the early years of Barack Obama’s ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

In 1524, hundreds of thousands of peasants across Germany took up arms against their social superiors. Peter Marshall investigates the causes and consequences of the German Peasants’ War, the largest ...

One of the more curious effluents of our current ecological crisis is the novel of environmental degradation, and specifically of deforestation. Such works – 2016’s Barkskins, by the Pulitzer Prize ...

Malcolm Budd is a lecturer in Philosophy at University College, London. He knows a good deal about music, but whether as a listener, performer or composer we have no means, other than the direct ...

THE ROMANTICISM THAT clothed the British effort in the Second World War has taken some decades to wear thin. Correlli Barnett, in his magisterial The Audit of War (published in 1986), gave the lie to ...

A glimpse of Roald Dahl’s adolescent correspondence and childhood is all it takes to recognise a born writer. In their elegant script and with their impressive respect for the niceties of spelling and ...