“If it keeps on rainin’”, sings Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s 1971 track, “levee’s gonna break.” The song is a cover of a 1929 recording by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, inspired by the Great ...

352pp. Faber. £7.99. The title of Alex Bell’s new fantasy adventure for nine- to twelve-year-olds sounds like a Wizarding World knock-off churned out by an AI. It’s a pity, because The Glorious Race ...

From Raffles to Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the mix of gentleman and crook has supplied a succession of compelling figures. Among the most famous from real life is Arthur Barry, the subject of ...

As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s ...

John le Carré’s most famous creation, the British spy George Smiley, was conceived as a complete antithesis to James Bond – being unsexy, middle-aged, overweight, cerebral, cuckolded – though, like ...

Victoria Moul, the Paris-based scholar of Latin and early modern English poetry, recently posed the question “What’s the point of [poetry] pamphlets?” on her eminently readable Substack blog, Horace & ...

There’s something a bit theme-park about Oxford. Lovers of fantasy fiction, young and old, can hurtle down Alice’s rabbit hole, as excavated by Lewis Carroll – the pseudonym of the Oxford don Charles ...

Veroniki Dalakoura (b.1952) first came to the notice of her translator, John Taylor, after their mutual friend Elias Petropoulos alerted him to her work. It is easy to see how Petropoulos, bard of the ...