The Latest Breaking News from Dickens

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

Percy Edgar’s story ‘shows just how important local broadcasting was in the early years of the BBC’, says grandson David, a playwright

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

This fast-paced comedy mashup of the great Victorian novelist sends up Britishness with oodles of silliness