We’ve waited seven years for Zadie Smith’s NW, the same number of years it took Joseph O’Neill to write Netherland and for Tom McCarthy to place Remainder with a mainstream publisher. It’s been four ...

IT has lately become a fashion to speak of realism, so called, as if it were a recent discovery or invention, like the telephone or the electric light. Realism in literature and art has always existed ...

Realism, for him, stresses the actuality of peoples’ lives and the way in which literature, through the art of mimesis, raised man (as Auerbach writes in his book on Dante) “out of the two-dimensional ...

I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at the age of thirty under intense, unshared, personal stress, and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the… ...

The picturesque aesthetic and the natural art of song -- Masterpiece theatres : art as spectacle in William Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë -- George Eliot's hierarchy of representation -- Art works : ...