Tolstoy
Helpless human puppets: Liberation Day, by George Saunders, reviewed
George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories…
Did postmodernism pave the way for Donald Trump?
David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews…
Celebrating Konstantin Paustovsky — hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
Borges: the man and the brand
‘The story that Jay Parini recounts in Borges and Me is untrue,’ a recent letter in the TLS claimed, ‘and…
Travelling by train – with Anna Karenina
Any memoir is a form of double-entry book-keeping, in which what has been lost is reckoned against what has been…
William Shakespeare: all things to all men
The best new books celebrating Shakespeare’s centenary are full of enthusiasm and insight — but none plucks out the heart of his mystery, says Daniel Swift
Ancient Egypt’s obsession with death was in fact a preoccupation with life
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
‘It’s good to chop out the boring bits!’: Andrew Davies on adapting War and Peace
What does Andrew Davies have to say to those who accuse him of gratuitous rumpy-pumpy in his adaptations of the classics? Stephen Smith finds out
A tale of two families
Gstaad War and Peace has been in the news lately, so what was it that Leo wrote about all happy…
War & Peace is actually just an upmarket Downton Abbey
Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale…
Radio 4’s War and Peace: almost as good as the book
To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on…
What parenting meant in 1914
‘Not still War and Peace!’ exclaimed my husband on 1 January during the all-day Tolstoy splurge on Radio 4. In reality…
This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…
George Orwell's doublethink
The inventor of ‘doublethink’ was consistently inconsistent in his own political views, says A.N. Wilson. And no fun at all
