More men than women have written to me about witnessing their sisters, mothers, friends and co-workers caught in the ...

Philip Larkin wrote This Be the Verse in 1971, a poem explaining that your parents ... she is practically a recluse and parents adopt her methods on the quiet. Chua, who was an academic mentor ...

In Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, a philosopher withdraws from civilisation and takes up residence in a cave, and a cynical spy is seduced by the idealists she’s been tasked with infiltrating — for ...

Choices, choices, always choices. On February 25th it was between an event in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall marking the third ...

In fact, he is a "hikikomori," or social recluse. Saito describes himself as “a Japanese novelist who writes novels and poems in Romanian while living in Japan.” “The story of how I ...

When we meet Enderby, he’s a recluse happily writing his poems on the commode, but a series of calamitous events—a disastrous love affair, a stolen poem, an escape to Morocco as a fugitive ...

Tax is supposed to be boring. But the ‘Song of the Husbandman’, a poem that ventriloquises the peasant discontent caused by Edward I’s new taxes, suggests the anger they provoked: ‘Now we must work, ...

He blamed his unfinished poem on ‘a person on business from Porlock’. Who was this arch-interrupter? Joanna Kavenna goes looking for the person from Porlock.