In 1983, the BBC broadcast an eight-part dramatisation called The Cleopatras. I dimly remember the actor Richard Griffiths commanding the small screen as a shaven-headed Ptolemy VIII (‘Potbelly’). The ...

Edward Casaubon is one of the less appealing characters in Middlemarch. A selfish and ageing clergyman, whom Dorothea Brooke unwisely marries, he devotes his time and attention to an encyclopedic ...

The Scandal of the Century is an enjoyable read, but there is no denying that it has its quirks. The title refers to the elopement in 1682 of eighteen-year-old Lady Henrietta Berkeley, daughter of the ...

From Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot, women have known that men tell their own stories. As Anne (or Austen) puts it, ‘the pen has been in their hands’. But very often, men are also ...

Those of us who romanticise France are familiar with books in which a British person attempts to ‘live the dream’ there. They’re essentially travel books, evocations of sunsets and cosy bistros offset ...

When Franz Kafka died on 3 June 1924, he had published just a few collections of short prose, none of them to much acclaim. The majority of the writing for which he is now known and celebrated, such ...

Saraid de Silva’s masterful debut opens with three life-changing events in the lives of Josephina, her daughter, Sithara, and her granddaughter, Annie. The novel follows the Fernando family from 1951 ...

In 2014, with the publication of her elegant, haunting debut, After Me Comes the Flood, it became immediately apparent that Sarah Perry was an extraordinary new talent to reckon with in English ...

It was in the barrio of Norte Grande, in the foothills of the Andes in northwest Argentina, that in 2018 a project was rolled out to try to predict who would become pregnant. Powerful machine learning ...

The Hearing Test is narrated by Eliza, a young artist and composer living alone in New York, who partially loses, then regains, her hearing. These are also the circumstances in which it was written.

To be a ‘bluestocking’ is nowadays considered the pits. Yet in their heyday, the second half of the 18th century, the original bluestockings were respected and even admired. The trashing of this ...

‘Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly,’ wrote Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. I suspect the subtitle of Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations ...