"Sometimes I'm tempted to throw away all I've written so far and start again, write quite a different kind of book, in the first person perhaps. Or write it in the third person but like a novel, with more freedom to go where a critical study could no...

In "Parallax" Sinead Morrissey documents what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs ("the different people who lived in sepia") are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a...

"Last Post", the fourth and final volume of Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Fo...

"The Book with Twelve Tales" is a gallimaufry of stories: comic, frightening, exotic and magical. Here, in John Gallas's richly imagined narrative worlds, are the American gothic of Morten Mortenssen, the pig who eats his owners; the sexual folktale...

Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes. Or does it? A man stands at a window, looking out. Behind him, a room, bare of people and of furniture. Fragments of conversations drop into his head, conversation...

Parade's End is the title Ford Madox Ford gave to his greatest work, the four Tietjens novels which, in Graham Greene's words, tell "the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned...

This volume brings together two historical novels based upon the Bible. "King Jesus" is a daring rewriting of the Gospels in the light of Graves's speculations in history and mythology. His Jesus is a charismatic religious reformer dedicated to the e...

She is eighty. Facing death, she considers her experiments with narrative, and with the narrative of her life. What is the purpose of the narrative she is creating here, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? At the centre of...

John Polidori (1795-1821) is a fascinating but always shadowy figure of Romanticism, an impetuous, sensitive writer of fierce talent. His encounter with Byron, Shelley and their circle has contributed both to his fame and notoriety on the one hand, a...

A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (T...