“The need to go home … hit me like grief”. Mairéad, the protagonist of Elaine Garvey’s debut novel, is experiencing the feeling of bereavement that often comes when, at the brink of “proper” adulthood ...

Germany enjoys the reputation of having confronted its Nazi past with impressive forthrightness, its cities filled with memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. But when it came to bringing former ...

Early in 1943, Maria Mandl, the tyrannical, sadistic unofficial head guard at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided that the moment had come to form a women’s orchestra. Fiercely jealous of her male ...

On stage, Harriet Walter always conveys sharp intelligence and humour, which is equally characteristic of her books Other People’s Shoes (1999) and Brutus and Other Heroines (2016). In those books ...

When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much. Scouting around Penzance for a suitable studio-cum-domicile following the breakdown of her marriage in 1947, she chanced, as ...

Few of the notorious haunted houses in fiction are occupied on the basis of annual contracts overseen by a letting agent: usually it is precisely these houses’ unregulated status that has allowed ...

In the autumn of 1900, the twenty-four-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke was suffering from writer’s block. He had recently returned from the second of two trips to Russia, and it was beginning to dawn on ...

Jennifer T. Roberts has been teaching the ancient world at American universities for fifty years, and at the City College of New York for three decades. In this valuable, capacious study, we reap the ...

In September 2021, the Swedish writer Johanna Ekström was diagnosed with a fatal melanoma of the eye. She was fifty-one and had been writing for thirty years, publishing fourteen books in various ...

Part-way through Natasha Brown’s new novel, Universality, Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist who recently managed to ...

368pp. Cape. £18.99. In Spring he dwells at boldly mimetic length on James’s non-starter of a relationship with Katherine, who is having a muted mid-thirties crisis of her own. Although the novel’s ...

Born in Cuba under colonial rule, the revolutionary writer José Martí died fighting Spanish royalists at the Battle of Dos Ríos in 1895. His life and writings were informed by strict humanitarian ...