In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

This stupid, vulgar, fatuous, conceited, half-baked and badly written book will give pleasure to the multitude of Trump haters. Many of these coalesce around the Doonesbury cartoons written by Gary ...

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 ...

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

Reconstruction of the past can rarely be complete. While the physical surroundings and style of a period can be invoked, we can never reconstruct how exactly people feel or think at a given moment. I ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

The days are long gone when philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition could airily dismiss Heidegger’s magisterial Being and Time as based on a mistake of language. His central importance in twentieth ...

Back in the early 1980s, in the depths of an Oxford winter, I remember trudging through the snow to attend something called the New College Fiction Symposium – a kind of brains trust featuring ...

‘What do you do for books?’ This is almost the first anguished cry from father to daughter recorded in these pages, and soon she was putting the same question to him. The persistence of the inquiry ...

Richard Aldington's translation of Laclos' novel first saw the light of day in 1924. It's hard to see why it should appear again now, without apology, under the imprint of the Open University. English ...