Book Review: The Last Word
/The incestuously-close relationship between a literary biographer and his subject lies at the heart of Hanif Kureishi's new novel
Read MoreThinking in Quotations
/On its schematic blueprints, the latest book by noted literary polymath Alberto Manguel is "about" Dante's Divine Comedy - but as Robert Minto discovers, this author is at his best when he's digressing.
Read MoreBook Review: Plato's Wayward Path
/Plato might be Western philosophy's first great writer, but a new book argues we've mostly been reading him wrong.
Read MoreBook Review: Those Who Write For Immortality
/"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work," Woody Allen famously quipped; "I want to achieve immortality through not dying." Robert Minto reviews a new book on what it takes to make it big in the literary afterlife
Read MoreInheritance of Anger
/The great Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa claims he became a writer in order to annoy his father; his new novel takes up this age-old theme of the strife between fathers and sons.
Read MoreBook Review: The Just City
/In Jo Walton's latest novel, the "just city" of Plato's Republic is brought to life via Greek gods, robots, and a little discreet time travel
Read MoreBook Review: Sartre: A Philosophical Biography
/Sartre the man takes a distant back seat to Sartre the thinker in Thomas Flynn's new intellectual biography
Read MoreSomething Beyond the Chaos
/The author made immortal by the novel Dune also wrote a career's worth of short stories. Robert Minto looks at the first-ever complete collection of those stories.
Read MoreThinking in Common
/The great critic and essayist Irving Howe laid claim to a great many decayed traditions - and then elevated them all to high art. A new collection of his prose presents some of his gems.
Read MoreBook Review: The Unsubstantial Air
/Even before America entered the First World War, daring young Americans were taking to the skies over France, and during the war some of their exploits became legendary; a gripping new history tells the story of America's first air war.
Read MoreWoven and Severed
/For millennia, the mighty tales in the epics of Homer have challenged and enthralled the world; a thought-provoking new book seeks to understand why.
Read MoreThe Done Thing
/England had been at war with France almost continuously since the Norman Conquest, but in the Hundred Years War, the conflict became especially heightened - and transformative. A new history tells the story as a rattling good yarn.
Read MoreBook Review: Demon's Brood
/Before the headline-grabbing Tudor dynasty, England was ramped from end to end by an even greater and more terrible family of kings and queens. They were the mighty Plantagenets, and a new book tells their story
Read More
