Born in 1905 in a village west of Kingston, Jamaica, Una Marson had an idyllic childhood in some respects. The youngest of six, a favourite of her father, the local parson, and with an Irish ...

In Northern Ireland, even today, whatever you choose to call the years between 1968 and 1998 – “The Troubles”, “the war”, “the armed struggle”, “the ...

Williams’s Careless People is a compulsively readable account of the effects of social media on democracy. Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Wynn-Williams left the company in 2017.

Koch’s bacillus – the cause of tuberculosis – was identified in 1882, earning the microbiologist Robert Koch the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. It was an early step on the road to the mastery ...

368pp. Cape. £18.99. In Spring he dwells at boldly mimetic length on James’s non-starter of a relationship with Katherine, who is having a muted mid-thirties crisis of her own. Although the novel’s ...

According to one outline narrative of British literary history, lyric had displaced epic as the dominant poetic genre by the early nineteenth century. Out with “Man’s First Disobedience”, “Arms, and ...

As in Sally Rooney’s previous novels, the main characters in Intermezzo fall in love quickly, tidily and passionately. They meet, their outfits are described, they exchange clipped dialogue and are ...

Visit the Times Bookshop to purchase the books below DAVID ABULAFIA In Courage and Compassion: A Jewish boyhood in German-occupied Greece (Berghahn), Tony Molho, a celebrated historian of Renaissance ...

Libyans, the narrator of My Friends tells a writer he admires, “never leave home. We go far, and might stay decades, but remain strapped to the old ...

The Devil’s Grip concerns an unnamed Swedish protagonist in a toxic relationship with a Florentine to whom she mentally refers “as il pulito” (“the clean one”). He is certainly “neat and tidy now”, ...

336pp. Yale University Press. £25. All this was accomplished in poorly paid and often insecure employment as librarians, administrators and, ultimately, professors. Jacob was also a diplomat, part of ...