Fewer children read out of school, that is, in their spare time – only a quarter of them, according to a report from the National Literacy Trust. This is somewhat depressing news for those brought u... Read More

Very few of us are competent to comment on the shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize, because we are unlikely to have read most of the writers on it – and may not even have heard of some ... Read More

A new Dan Brown novel will be published in May, to the delight (I suppose) of his millions of readers and the dismay of many others who think his books unmitigated tripe. More of them later. Meanwhile... Read More

It was about 15 years ago that I first realized how the second-hand bookshop business was changing. I took two or three big cardboard boxes of review copies and other books which publishers had sent m... Read More

Last week The Spectator invited some 15 or 16 writers – novelists and journalists – to name “the classic books they most dislike”, and say why they do so. This is of course an agreeable after-... Read More

Reviewing in The Spectator Richard Bradford’s The Odd Couple, an account of what Bradford calls “the curious friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin”, Nigel Jones says that Lucky Jim ... Read More

Two hundred and fifty years ago, in 1762, the Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was established by royal appointment at the University of Edinburgh, the first Regius Professor being the Rev Hugh Bl... Read More

In the wake of the success of the first instalment of Ford’s “Parade’s End”, Philip Hensher had an excellent article in this paper last week about the rise and fall of authorial reputations. A... Read More

Andrew Flintoff says that Michael Atherton has no right to criticise Alastair Cook because Cook is “10 times the player Atherton was”, and has a Test average of nearly 50 while Atherton’s was 37... Read More

“Before Hilary Mantel, historical novels were a joke,” declares my fellow blogger Guy Stagg. “By and large,” it seems, they “are just pulp fiction with a historical setting.” This cuts me ... Read More