Serial killers, convicted or alleged, undoubtedly exude a kind of corrupt majesty. Among them, for sheer originality and rather whiffy charisma, the modern emperor must be Jeffrey Dahmer. It was, of ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Andrew Miller likes to shift the ground beneath his reader's feet. His first two novels, Ingenious Pain and Casanova, were set in the eighteenth century; Oxygen alternated between Paris, Los Angeles ...

Private Life was one of only three novels that Sagarra wrote. Although criticised on its appearance for its scandalous subject matter, it has become his most famous book on account of its accurate ...

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 ...

In the threadbare 1940s, Horizon, which had been nursed through the Second World War in increasingly &agile health by its editor Cyril Connolly, dispatched a questionnaire to a selection of leading ...

The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

Reading the publisher's blurb for this novel, I'm disappointed. It promises an 'exciting new departure' from Maggie O'Farrell's previous work, the best book you'll read all year, and so on. 'Exciting' ...

There has been nothing in English historical writing over recent decades to match the intensity of interest in the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. The foundations were laid a century or so ...

J G Ballard’s new novel is as the title implies a psychopathic tour-de-force, in which the author’s genius for suspense, powerful atmospherics and evocation of place is displayed with consummate skill ...