The final days of June last year were a wonderful time for vicarious lovers of bling. On the 22nd, the third season of Julian Fellowes’s lavish TV series, The Gilded Age, dropped on HBO. Just days lat

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

Were Julie and Cheryl about to begin new chapters in their lives?

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

The acclaimed American author and literary critic talks to Zoe West