In fact our morbid fascination with death has been created and recreated in countless different ways. Death has power. It's the number one box office draw. It's why the media concentrate on tragedy. It's why the soap operas kill off a major character to get Christmas ratings.

Everybody's familiar with the big literary names that line bookshelves in homes and libraries: Hemingway, Woolf, Fitzgerald. Some may even be fami...

At the beginning of the 21st Century, brevity is back in vogue. Twitter is an extension of Hemingway's challenge to anyone brave enough to accept it, and, like the modernists' reaction to photography and the 'brief encounter', it cultivates new ways of seeing and thinking.

"It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." It’s with thos...

Churning out inspirational quotes about writing has been a favourite past time of authors and poets throughout the ages. Like many creative types, ...

The differences between the sexes is well-trodden ground for book publishers. Self-help sections are lined with hundreds of variations on Men Are F...

We all ache to know what could have been. If only we'd caught that train, or took that job, or not acquiesced to that last flaming Sambuca... if on...

Feuding, fighting and fisticuffs are not things we normally associate with literary types. More often we think of someone sat at a desk covered in ...

When we set out to pick the ten characters from literature that we’d hate to have over for Christmas dinner, we had one simple rule – no monsters....

George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookshop that became a place of pilgrimage for lovers of English-language literature, has ...