Toby Lichtig assesses the latest recreation of Bob Dylan, the man and the myth, and David Gallagher discusses an academic and spy who inspired the work of Javier Marías Boris Dralyuk on a compelling ...

Sir Peter Russell (1913–2006) was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1981. He was also Director of Portuguese Studies, and the author of a ...

For some people, writing in a language other than their mother tongue presents an obvious advantage. No longer constrained by their usual grammatical and lexical norms, they unconsciously import turns ...

Reading, we all know, is a peculiar act. It takes us out of ourselves into realms we might otherwise have missed – deeper, wider, stranger, perhaps launching us backwards or forwards in time, or into ...

Australia has often been called a “new country,” but its poetry has seldom been thought of in these terms. Les Murray (1938–2019), still the country’s best-known poet, memorably styled himself as a ...

Early in Josephine Tey’s classic mystery The Daughter of Time (1951), Inspector Grant, laid up with a broken leg and vainly seeking distraction with a heap of the latest bestsellers, remarks ...

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.480–524 CE), statesman, philosopher and scholar whose aim was to translate the entire works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, was a prominent figure in late ...

Country house studies is no longer the placid research field it used to be. This stems above all from the controversies stirred by the bicentennial commemoration, in 2007, of the British abolition of ...

One notable simile in Antony and Cleopatra is uttered by a character of Shakespeare’s own invention, Scarus, according to whom Antony absents himself from the Battle of Actium “like a doting mallard”.

Early in Shakespeare in Love, as Will is hurrying through London to his psychiatrist, he hears a Puritan preacher “haranguing anyone who will listen to him”, as Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s ...