“If it keeps on rainin’”, sings Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s 1971 track, “levee’s gonna break.” The song is a cover of a 1929 recording by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, inspired by the Great ...

352pp. Faber. £7.99. The title of Alex Bell’s new fantasy adventure for nine- to twelve-year-olds sounds like a Wizarding World knock-off churned out by an AI. It’s a pity, because The Glorious Race ...

John le Carré’s most famous creation, the British spy George Smiley, was conceived as a complete antithesis to James Bond – being unsexy, middle-aged, overweight, cerebral, cuckolded – though, like ...

Victoria Moul, the Paris-based scholar of Latin and early modern English poetry, recently posed the question “What’s the point of [poetry] pamphlets?” on her eminently readable Substack blog, Horace & ...

As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s ...

Living in a rural commune in the late 1970s and 1980s, Susanna Crossman became adept at knowing how to behave in the presence of outsiders. Journalists from newspapers, radio and TV regularly came to ...

For years Max Boot was a darling of the American political right. The Soviet-born son of Jewish refuseniks, he came to the US at the age of six, settling with his family in Southern California. By ...

“I once thought that I’d become a care worker by chance, but now I wonder if it was simply inevitable”, writes Kathryn Faulke in her memoir, Every Kind of ...