Here love is made astonishingly immediate and sensually illicit – ‘Your breasts and shoulders would reek’ – and the poem gains from being both magical and clear. Being English and sensible, I find too ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo ...

A Britain without the South Asian British is now almost unthinkable. With a few exceptions – farming, fishing and the armed forces spring to mind – there are few sectors of UK life where the ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

Among the Indian novelists who arrived on the world stage after the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, Amitav Ghosh has long stood out for the range and consistency of his work. Indian ...

The ultimate purpose of what is now only the second least reputable literary prize going is to render itself redundant by discouraging poorly written, gratuitous or unnecessary passages of sexual ...

For two such different books, one by a single author concentrating on the future, the other a collection of many voices assessing and reminiscing about the past, there are unexpected points of contact ...

The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened. @StephenSmithWDS wonders how ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as ...