Doing well in exams, which is what parents always want for their children (or at least have done since it began to matter to any degree to middle and working class kids), has always been under threat from the kind ...

A small notice appeared in Le Monde (August 24th) last week under the title “Le label LIR accordé à 58 nouvelles librairies” (LIR status given to another 58 bookshops). What is LIR? The capitals stand for Librairie indépendante de reference ...

Terence Blacker is musing in the London Independent (August 20th) on the idea of privatising the library service.

It’s not his idea, mind you, more that of the British culture minister, Ed Vaizey, who last week launched “The Future Libraries ...

The James Tait Black Memorial Prize, awarded each year jointly to a novel and a biography, has gone this year to AS Byatt and John Carey.

Byatt received the prize, at a ceremony in Edinburgh yesterday, for her novel The Children’s Book...

The city council in Gdansk, Poland is to conduct a ceremony in honour of Irishman Sean Lester at its headquarters in the city next Thursday.

Lester, who was born in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim and who joined the Irish Department of ...

John Mullan in The Guardian, writing the obituary of the critic Frank Kermode, who died on Tuesday aged ninety, recalls the book which secured his reputation, written more than fifty years ago.

Romantic Image (1957) was “an account of ...

A sparkling review by Neal Ascherson of Adam Sisman’s biography of the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in the London Review of Books.

“In the 1950s,” Ascherson writes, “there still existed in Britain a few fairylands of ancient privilege and ...

An interview with Pascal Fouché, a noted French historian of the book, is translated and republished from the French review Esprit in Eurozine (www.eurozine.com).

“It’s true,” he says, “that the most important question is what will happen to the publishing process ...

Howard Jacobson, whose new novel The Finkler Question is on the Booker longlist, is interviewed by Lindesay Irvine, for the Guardian’s books Review.

Invited to fulminate about his neglect by literary award-givers, Jacobson chooses instead to make a ...

Pierre Assouline, in his regular Le Monde blog La République des Livres, pays tribute to Tony Judt, who died late last week.

“Provocative? It goes without saying. Tony Judt was one of those fighter-intellectuals, as there are writer-travellers. He ...