J G Ballard’s new novel is as the title implies a psychopathic tour-de-force, in which the author’s genius for suspense, powerful atmospherics and evocation of place is displayed with consummate skill ...

The Compasses, a dingy pothouse in High Wycombe, was not the most likely place to encounter John Milton, Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. Yet it was here, in March 1794, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

Modernism had a long run, more than a century indeed. Its duration and variety make it almost impossible to define. When Cyril Connolly gave us his 100 Key Books of the Modern Movement, he included ...

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 ...

Halfway through reading Ed Yong’s first book, I found myself in A&E with a son in anaphylactic shock after he unwittingly ate some nuts. According to the book I’m reading, I told the medics gathered ...

Jonathan Bate has a true novelist’s gift for scene setting and story telling. He spots interesting details and connections overlooked by previous writers, allowing his lively imagination to play ...

In the 1970s, as feminism burst onto the stage, theorists and activists struggled to make sense of the ways in which patriarchal attitudes lived inside us and had constructed us as girls and boys, ...

As an Irishwoman married to an Englishman, I try to be ecumenical in matters of Anglo-Irish history – it makes for peace, and it brings richer rewards of knowledge too. Ronan Fanning, a professor at ...