A New York housewife believes that the grotesque protagonist of her husband's novel is based on her. The ensuing paranoic spiral is gripping enough to satisfy any Hitchcock fan...
Had Mrs Gaskell lived in Japan and a century later, she might have written this intimate portrait of four sisters of good family living in Osaka in somewhat straitened circumstances. Their e... read more
Written in 2015 by the chess grandmaster and human rights activist, this passionate indictment of Russian kleptocracy is also a warning against the complacency of Western democracies in the ... read more
The great Russian poet became a master of the English language in his long American exile: these essays evoke his youth in post-WW2 Leningrad with memorable portraits of his parents, in whom... read more
Born in 1914 in Czernovitz in what is now Ukraine, the author was successively a citizen of Austro-Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union as the bloody tides of the C20th swept to and fro bef... read more
Had Mrs Gaskell lived in Japan and a century later, she might have written this intimate portrait of four sisters of good family living in Osaka in somewhat straitened circumstances. Their e... read more