Though a talented poet, Rebecca Watts remains best known for her essay “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, published in the poetry journal PN Review in 2018. It was ironic that this piece attracted much ...

A person’s proximity to death is often a turning point: an opportunity to reflect on ventures, obsessions and the mistakes of the past before it becomes too late. Martín Caparrós acknowledges this ...

“Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman once said. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work”, Which means it’s a wonder that any ...

Margaret Drabble explores how Dickens drew on his love of the macabre and grotesque to create literary magic and Norma Clarke takes a tour around the British coast Peter Holland treads the boards in ...

In April 1576, James Burbage, a joiner turned actor, signed a lease on a half-acre patch of land in Shoreditch. The district was conveniently located outside the walls of the City of London, with its ...

288pp. Icon. £22.99. Cape Wrath, in the northwest corner of Scotland, is not so named for angry seas and violent storms. The name derives from the Old Norse word for “turning point”. The naturalist ...

On a cold December day in 1962, Nikita Khrushchev stepped outside the Kremlin to see some art. The occasion was the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Artists’ Union, an official Soviet institution ...

This is now the third time Tim Parks has dwelt in print on an error of mine in a translation of a short story by Giorgio Bassani (Letters, April 4), dismaying for the ...