The novel centres on Phil, a ‘flower born to blush unseen’, and unkind readers might wish this flower to remain that way.

Henry Phillips, Glenda George, George Craig, David Coward: French Books in Brief - Ideas in Seventeenth Century France by E J. Kearns; Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Drama and Thought by Robert ...

The centrepiece of this large volume lies towards the end, and it concerns the biggest blunder made by Moscow, which came towards the end of the existence of the USSR. At Christmas 1979, the Soviets ...

Warren Farrell has set out to write a very brave book, one which feminists have been waiting for for many years. It would be the sort of land mark text The Female Eunuch or The Feminine Mystique was ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

I hate cats, I have no particularly strong feelings about pigs and I am vaguely fond of mice. Presumably these are the emotions I am supposed to have towards the Nazis, Poles and Jews from Art ...

Three Kings: Three Stories from Today's China By Ah Cheng (Translated by Bonnie S McDougall) Collins Harvill 224pp £14.95 ...

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift presented such aberrations of nature as people the size of mice, giants towering like steeples and ancients doomed to immortality. This novel by the Portuguese writer and ...

While it seems unlikely that Russell Hoban will again write anything as memorable as Riddley Walker or his evergreen children’s books, his late run of novels (the seven books from 1999’s Angelica’s ...

Just before Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and ruler of Bohemia, was, as the Irish put it, shot off, Walter Frentz made a colour portrait photograph. Hitler, anticipating further staff losses ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...