Perhaps no cause has been more consistently trumpeted by successive British leaders than that of “social mobility”.

This week, we hear from two international prize-winning authors, Jenny Erpenbeck and Mircea Cărtărescu.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century India’s intellectual classes professed a cautious optimism – verging at times on self-congratulation – about the nation’s tryst with democracy. For many, the ...

The universe indulged in a knowing joke when it decreed that “The Metamorphosis” (Die Verwandlung) would be the first full-length text I would struggle though in German, a language I spent much of ...

On a tiny square off Boulevard Raspail in Paris stands a tall, oddly proportioned bronze statue. When Homage to Captain Dreyfus was commissioned in 1985 by the then culture minister, Jack Lang, it ...

Juano Diaz, a successful multi-media artist, has written a powerful and at times harrowing memoir, Slum Boy, about his early life in late-twentieth-century Glasgow. The narrative begins with Diaz aged ...

There’s Always This Year must be the first basketball memoir written by someone under 6ft. But Hanif Abdurraqib (5ft 7in) was never a professional basketball player – he is a poet, essayist and critic ...

It is an enduring paradox of modern literature that one of the darkest and most demanding writers of the twentieth century should have become one of the most celebrated. Franz Kafka, who died on June ...

Early in this quirky biography Dale Salwak recounts a meeting between Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, and Herman Melville. The elder Hawthorne and Melville had once been kindred spirits; both men ...

In Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel, we follow the fortunes of eight young women – Artemis Victor, Andi Taylor, Kate Heffer, Rachel Doricko, Iggy Lang, Izzy Lang, Rose Mueller, Tanya Maw – who ...

Why didn’t Shakespeare mention cricket? We can discount, as Brendan Cooper concedes in Echoing Greens, his comprehensive survey of cricket in the English imaginative arts, the reference to a “grained ...