Somewhere in the skirts of the fabled land of Prester John, late in the 12th century, Baudolino, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, encounters a pygmy. He discovers that ‘the greeting to ...

In fact, John Mullan is a professor of English himself at the University College in London. As a scholar, he specialises in 18th century fiction and he knows more than most that books about the ...

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice. Imagine Jane Austen had not died on this day 200 years ago, aged only 41. Imagine that she’d ...

Writers do not always know what their best writings are. Daniel Defoe believed his magnum opus to be his huge, passionately political, intermittently philosophical poem in heroic couplets, Jure Divino ...

How Novels Work: according to John Mullan (repeat) Transcript The Book Show's first guest for 2007, John Mullan, said that until recently, literary criticism was something that only professors and ...

There is no sign that Freud read Jane Austen. Yet in her use of the words ‘unconscious’ and ‘unconsciously’, Austen might have had some claim to his attention. The words had been around in English ...

The trailer for the recent BBC dramatisation of Byron’s life made no bones about the poet’s appeal. ‘Everything you’ve ever heard about him is true,’ the husky female voice-over promised. Here was a ...