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 ...

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is this year's winner of the @BGPrize. In her review from our June issue, @rosalyster delves into Tasmania, nuclear physics, romance and Chekhov.

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AFTER ANITA BROOKNER'S brief experiment with an elderly man as the main character in last year's novel, The Next Big Thing, her trademark women are back at the centre here - and back with a vengeance.

Richard Flanagan's Question 7 is this year's winner of the @BGPrize. In her review from our June issue, @rosalyster delves into Tasmania, nuclear physics, romance and Chekhov.

Just towards the end of Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant new novel, the reader is treated to a ghost-story, told in the manner of M R James. It is the harrowing tale of an 1870s archaeological dig in a ...

Michael Foot is a soldier and a scholar, which is a rare combination. He is a gentleman, too, something less identifiable nowadays. One of his principal subjects is Gladstone’s papers; the other is ...

One of my journalism professors, a gruff newspaper editor named Klaus Pohle, once posed a question about mass media that is both critical and unresolvable: where does the public interest end and the ...

Building a state takes decades of hard labour. Destroying one can be done virtually overnight. In September 2018, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, flew to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to ...

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and ...

Wolfgang Münchau has, for more than thirty years, been one of the most acute and penetrating commentators on the European Union, writing in the Financial Times, the New Statesman and elsewhere. What I ...

Does anything ever truly happen in the Messiah? This extraordinarily popular tripartite choral work, first performed in Dublin in 1742, consists almost entirely of saying rather than of doing.