Philip Hensher

Public libraries deserve to shut – they’ve forgotten why they exist

5 July 2025 9:00 am

The usual piece about public libraries runs like this. Public libraries are for ‘more than just books’. They are in…

‘Too bohemian for Bournemouth’: the young Lawrence Durrell

28 June 2025 9:00 am

Begged by his mother to go somewhere his behaviour wouldn’t ‘show so much’, the future novelist, aged 19, embarked on a lifetime of travel and rarely visited Britain again

A.C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists

14 June 2025 9:00 am

The intimate of writers, politicians and royalty, Benson confined his waspish anecdotes to journals kept over a period of 40 years, now available in a magnificent two-volume edition

Spare us from ‘experimental’ novels

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Some sorts of books and dramas have very strict rules. We like a lot of things to be absolutely predictable.…

What Mark Twain owed to Charles Dickens

7 June 2025 9:00 am

It wasn’t just Dickens’s stage performances and publishing ventures that fascinated Twain, but the witty, journalistic style, which he mimicked to great effect in early travel books

Studying Dickens at university was once considered demeaning. Now it’s too demanding

10 May 2025 9:00 am

Accessible, ‘relevant’ short stories are increasingly replacing the classics, as the monuments of Victorian literature defeat today’s undergraduates

Whether adored or despised, Princess Diana is never forgotten

3 May 2025 9:00 am

Edward White examines the effect of the former Princess of Wales on the millions worldwide who never even laid eyes on her

Why the Japanese flock to Battersea Park

12 April 2025 9:00 am

They weren’t familiar park visitors, but a couple with a specific purpose, laden down with camera equipment. They unpacked carefully,…

A novel in disguise: Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser, reviewed

29 March 2025 9:00 am

De Kretser’s witty, innovative take on the immigrant’s predicament tries ingeniously to persuade us that we are not reading fiction but documentary truth

The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology

8 February 2025 9:00 am

The short-lived 16th-century revolt resolved absolutely nothing, but it loomed large in Engels’s thought and in the official DDR interpretation of history

The beauty and tedium of the works of Adalbert Stifter

18 January 2025 9:00 am

The 19th-century Austrian was an astonishingly pure stylist, as W.G. Sebald acknowledges – but it takes real dedication to craft to write such boring novels

Once upon a time in Germany: the Grimms’ legacy of revenge and gory redemption

11 January 2025 9:00 am

The Household Tales only attained their standing after the brothers’ death, with the unification of Germany and the decades of nationalism that led to catastrophe

The joy of the Turkish barber

7 December 2024 9:00 am

Just as you always hope will happen, I knew I had met the man of my dreams almost on sight.…

Reading the classics should be a joy, not a duty

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Edwin Frank’s survey of 20th-century fiction stresses the po-faced seriousness of the great novel. But many masterpieces revel in the ridiculous – or are about nothing at all

The joy of weight loss

19 October 2024 9:00 am

It was a few months ago. I was coming back from my morning walk with Greta in Battersea Park, so…

The demonising of homosexuals in postwar Britain

19 October 2024 9:00 am

The tabloids in particular stirred up fear and distrust with lurid stories of orgies, prostitution, drug-taking, political corruption, sinister concealment and susceptibility to blackmail

The trivial details about royalty are what really fascinate us

31 August 2024 9:00 am

Craig Brown’s focus on specifics that other biographers would consider beneath them brings rich rewards

The dark side of your local dog show

3 August 2024 9:00 am

Over at the judging for Waggiest Tail, things were getting acrimonious. ‘That bloody woman,’ my new acquaintance muttered. We were…

Dedicated to debauchery: the life of Thom Gunn

13 July 2024 9:00 am

Even the most liberal-minded reader might be surprised by the amount of crack cocaine, LSD, alcohol and casual sex the poet indulged over the course of 50 years

The clue to Shakespeare’s sexuality lies in the sonnets

6 July 2024 9:00 am

They are quite unlike any other sonnet sequence of the time and seem to be a kind of personal statement – written by a man with undeniable feelings for another man

The art of talking to strangers

22 June 2024 9:00 am

About halfway round the park, by the last spindly remnants of the Festival of Britain, I bumped into my Scandinavian…

What’s really behind the Tories’ present woes?

25 May 2024 9:00 am

Geoffrey Wheatcroft identifies two root causes: the disastrous revision of the leadership election procedure, and David Cameron’s turn to the referendum as a device to govern

My vote winner? Banning ‘fun’ runs

11 May 2024 9:00 am

One of us must once have told a political pollster: ‘I really have no idea at all who I’m going…

Exploring the glorious literary heritage of Bengal

11 May 2024 9:00 am

Bengalis are renowned for their love of discussion and argument, and a new collection of short stories reflects this passion for cultured conversation

The Berkeley scandal of 1681 transfixed London society – and Aphra Behn soon capitalised on it

4 May 2024 9:00 am

In The Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister, often called the ‘first English novel’, Behn successfully milked the affair for all it was worth