AFTER ANITA BROOKNER'S brief experiment with an elderly man as the main character in last year's novel, The Next Big Thing, her trademark women are back at the centre here - and back with a vengeance.

First published exactly seventy years ago, Sir John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 has never been out of print. Compact and clearly written, it somehow managed to encompass a ...

Nick Harkaway, John le Carré's son, has gone back to the 1960s with a new novel featuring his father's anti-hero, George Smiley.

Buildings do a better job of surviving than people, sometimes by thousands of years. Indeed, we regard a building as a failure if it does not outlive the people who built it. There’s a joke in the ...

With Saints, Amy Jeffs makes her own contribution to the centuries-old tradition of abridging and compiling saints’ lives. Medieval hagiographies, or lives of saints, served as edifying examples of ...

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and ...

At the start of Mammoth, the third novel in the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s ‘triptych’, the unnamed narrator organises a party in order to trick a man (any man) into having sex with her. She wants ...

There is a photograph of Mies van der Rohe talking to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. It was taken in May 1929 during the opening ceremony for Mies’s German Pavilion, built for that year’s World Fair in ...

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The oft-repeated rhyme memorialises the moment that the Atlantic, and what lay beyond, entered the realms of Western historiography. A more expansive view of ...

If humanity were to achieve the perfect society, would we actually be able to tolerate it? This is one of the imponderables of utopian thinking. Written between 1927 and 1929, Andrey Platonov’s debut ...

It’s striking, if not startling, to be reminded that Ronald Blythe, the gifted, poised and complacent familiar spirit of the Essex–Suffolk border, was once a favourite of the New York Times, feted in ...

With his debut novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, the Guardian journalist Xan Brooks proved himself a writer of solidly constructed historical fiction. In his second book, he ...