At Home with the Letwins’ Salon
Bill and Shirley Letwin kept open house for open minds from Chicago to Cambridge and Hampstead
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Life with Father
Sports-pages-stalwart Roger Mortimer's writing has been resurrected with the publication of letters to his children
Transatlantic Vanity Project
Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein's published correspondence is a phoney exercise in literary bitchiness and mutual back-slapping
More Than a Curmudgeon
R.S. Thomas is frequently characterised as a misanthropic ogre. On the centenary of his birth, the publication of his humane Uncollected Poems belies this misplaced view
Long Live the Novella
Two recently translated European novellas, by Sophie Divry and Brigit Vanderbeke, are wonderful examples of this short literary form
Literary Biography is on Life Support
The art of recording a writer’s career will have to be reinvented to survive in the internet era
The Poet To Whom Fascism Owed It All
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Life of Gabriele D'Annunzio paints a picture of a compelling and anarchic poet-statesman
From Russia, With Erudition
Mikhail Shishkin's new novel — the first to arrive in English — is ambitious, complicated and protean. And brilliant
A Novelist With Ice In His Heart
J.M. Coetzee is a curiously chilly author and his Kafkaesque new novel is a parable about the writer's place in a world ruled by cold rationalism
ONLINE ONLY: Shelf Life
The Pleasure of Thinking is a window on the eclectic library and well-oiled mind of Theodore Dalrymple
Posthumous Wisdom
A prodigious command of English, ingenious playfulness, an obsessive eye for detail: David Foster Wallace's essays trump his novels
This Strange and Contradictory Poet
Far from being a thoroughly aestheticised figure, John Keats had an active social conscience; his critics were suspicious of his radical politics