This essay attempts to do two things. Firstly, it seeks to offer a brief tour of some of the developments in western literature,…

Margaret Atwood is one of the most important and influential writers alive today. Her fiction explores and reflects the current cultural…

Perhaps a society truly becomes lost when it doesn't know how lost it is. This is the eerie suggestion put forward by Never Let Me Go,…

Mark Meynell is disoriented by the reality-probing of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. There are three deaths. The first is when…

To my mind, one of the main interests of Philip Pullman’s controversial trilogy is not specifically related to the books. It lies in…

The most recent strain of Brontemania, at large throughout 2011, included major film versions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and the…

According to the Romans, ‘bread and circuses’ were the key to keeping a population content. As long as their immediate physical…

It doesn’t take usually take too much persuasion to get me to try a new box set of DVDs, but I have to say that I was a little…

Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel The Kite Runner, set in the author’s homeland Afghanistan, became a Hollywood blockbuster…