The Latest Breaking News from Dickens

There’s only one sleuth in Victorian London who can get to the bottom of the suspicious death of Ebenezer Scrooge, in this winning crossover mystery

The satirist on who makes him laugh, Tory attacks on the BBC, and the physics behind his sci-fi sitcom

There seems to be no sense of shame or its cousin, guilt, in our time.

Too often, we forget that fights about what we shouldn’t read are also battles over what we should read. And that every time someone attempts to ban Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re also trying to corral our kids back to Hawthorne and Hemingway, Dante and Dickens.

The novelist on taking lessons from Doris Lessing, being inspired by John Steinbeck and why she can no longer read JD Salinger

Unconventional characters, uncertain paternity issues: Irving’s 15th novel retreads familiar ground, but is overlong and poorly edited

What I remember most vividly from school are not the lessons in the classroom — reading Dickens, studying trigonometry, internalising French grammar. What I remember from Thomas Tallis in Kidbrooke are the school trips, after school clubs, preschool activities in the cafeteria where I chatted amiably with all the other…

In praise of Kate De Goldi's latest novel.

While not a stand-up, the wordsmith has the natural cadences of a classic acerbic New York comic