Nationalist stirrings
Philip Hensher on how an impassioned, chaotic group of amateur 19th-century composers created the first distinctively Russian music
Dutch comfort
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel…
Indecent exposure
This biography has somewhat more news value than most literary biographies. Its subject worked hard to ensure that. After 1965,…
A guide to the Man Booker longlist
The Man Booker prize has strong years and weak years. There have been ones when the judges have succeeded in…
Victorian values
Philip Hensher says that Churchill’s engagement with the empire does not reveal him at his finest hour
