In July 1915 Lili Brik’s younger sister, Elsa – who later married Andre Triolet and emigrated to France, where she became a writer and Aragon’s constant companion brought the twenty-two-year-old ...

Impostor syndrome was first described in 1978 by the psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. It is now such a common phenomenon that organisations all across the world run seminars and ...

When I was a child my older brother had a Benetton T-shirt that was adorned with images of various species of fish and carried the message ‘If this pollution continues we will grow legs and join you.’ ...

Anyone familiar with Jung Chang’s earlier work will know what to expect from her. She paints China’s intense and complex history in bold strokes. This new book offers up roughly a century’s worth of ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

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 ...

‘Populists are rebelling not only against a specific (liberal) type of politics but also against the replacement of communist orthodoxy by liberal orthodoxy,’ write Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.

‘When I hear the word culture I reach for the safety-catch of my Browning.’ These words, often attributed to Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels, were actually spoken by a character in Schlageter, a ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

The Scapegoat is Sophia Nikolaidou’s first book to be translated into English, despite her considerable literary reputation in Greece. It opens with the death of an American journalist as he is ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...