Future of a ruined Germany
George Orwell: To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.

Back to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood: The street where I used to live is behind the Nollendorfplatz.

The next 80 years
Bertrand Russell: My last ten years, according to the Scriptures, ought to have consisted of labour and sorrow, but in fact I have had less of both than in most previous decades.

The voice of the young
Kenneth Tynan: Look Back In Anger presents post-war youth as it really is.

Chatterley: When sex was put on trial
Kenneth Tynan: Now that the case is over it seems suddenly unthinkable that the jury could have brought in any other verdict.

The world according to Spielberg
Martin Amis: Steven Spielberg's films have grossed approximately $1,500 million. He is 34, and well on his way to becoming the most effective popular artist of all time... What's he got? How do you do it? Can I have some?

Rushdie in hiding after Ayatollah's death threat
1989: Mr Salman Rushdie was in hiding under police protection last night and unrepentant about the contents of his novel, The Satanic Verses, which yesterday provoked the Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to call for his execution.

Craig Raine's obituary of Philip Larkin
1985: Legend has it that once, at a dismally inept amateur boxing match in Hull, Philip Larkin turned to his neighbour with the words "Only connect." In its way, this is typical of Larkin. Not only that he should thus introduce a hallowed Forsterian nostrum into a coarse context, but also that he should yearn for aggression and directness.

Obituary: Frank Raymond Leavis
1978: Leavis used his Cambridge lecture room in the 50s like an ideological slit-trench. Often he would snap off single shots: "Milton is as mechanical as a bricklayer." Sometimes he would throw hand grenades: "There's something wrong with T. S. Eliot down there (pointing towards his waist) - or even lower."

Shosha
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer begins with a disconcerting irony: "I was brought up in three dead languages - Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish." This ironic statement functions as an invocation of those dead who spoke, specifically, the Yiddish of Poland.

Looking back at Superman
1977: John Osborne writes: Sir, Michael Billington cannot have read the plays of George Bernard Shaw since his Oxford days. To call him 'the greatest British dramatist since Shakespeare' is close to having a critical brainstorm, as well as perpetuating an exam-crazy classroom myth.

The First Circle
1968: For a country to have a great writer is like having another Government. The man who says this is Innokenty Volodin, a Soviet diplomat in Solzhenitsyn's new novel. But it is more than the voice of a character. It is the challenge which Russian writers have put to our civilisation

Margaret Drabble on the sexual revolution
1967: It is no longer possible to deny that we face the certainty of a sexual revolution, and that this revolution, which much affects the institutions of marriage and parenthood, is caused largely by the development of contraceptive techniques.

Philip Larkin on Ain't Misbehavin'
1966: Fats Waller's face, fourteen versions of which appear on the cover of Ed Kirkeby's Ain't Misbehavin', was the kind you can carve on an orange; squeeze it one way and it laughs, another and it weeps or looks puzzled.

In Cold Blood
1965: Whatever its merits, In Cold Blood is already more than a book: it is a happening. It represents a fantastic publishing operation, an example of the technology of assured success at its most sophisticated.

Anatomy of Britain
1962: The loss of empire and the social changes of the last 20 years have provoked a fumbling, incoherent search for national identity. In a variety of forms it is one of the main preoccupations of Mr Anthony Sampson's brilliant and penetrating Anatomy of Britain.

Lady Chatterley acquitted
1960: The jury's verdict on Lady Chatterley's Lover is a triumph of common sense - and the more pleasing because it was unexpected.

Kathleen Raine's Collected Poems
1956: For nearly twenty years Miss Kathleen Raine has sought to express in her poetry abstract themes fundamental to man and his position in the universe -the unity of creation, the conflict of spirit and selfhood - and the publication of her Collected Poems demonstrates how far the height and intensity of this purpose set her apart from her contemporaries.

Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female
1953: Although no doubt the advertisement was repaying, the early sensational newspaper accounts of the Indiana University inquiry associated with Dr. Kinsey's name hardly did him justice. The full book is serious and factual, with a vocabulary well above the heads of most.

The Common Pursuit
1952: Dr. Leavis does not write to divert your leisure hours with benign reflections about literature; his book is an arduous, subtle, and prolonged exercise in a highly developed technique of reasoning - what he would call the discipline of literary criticism.

Nineteen Eighty-Four
1949: Though all "thinking people," as they are still sometimes called, must by now have more than a vague idea of the dangers which mankind runs from modern techniques, George Orwell, like Aldous Huxley, feels that the more precise we are in our apprehensions the better. Nineteen Eighty-Four speaks of the psychological breaking-in process to which an up-to-date dictatorship can subject non-cooperators.

The Naked and the Dead
1949: In the matter of The Naked and the Dead our duty as liberal and educated people is clear. If it comes to a showdown we stand by Norman Mailer. His book is tremendously good, and perhaps better than that.

Animal Farm
1945: Mr. George Orwell's Animal Farm, described as a fairy story, is a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few.

Finnegans Wake
1939: Mr. Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," parts of which have been published as "Work in Progress," does not admit of review. In twenty years' time, with sufficient study and with the aid of the commentary that will doubtless arise, one might be ready for an attempt to appraise it.

Obituary: W.B. Yeats
1939: We much regret to announce the death of Mr. W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, who died at Mentone, in the Riviera, on Saturday, age 73 years.

Obituary: Dr. Sigmund Freud
1939: Freud's attitude towards psychoanalysis cannot be understood until his two fundamental beliefs are appreciated. The first is that every event in the mind can be described and explained in mental terms; the other, loaded as it is with complex philosophical implications, can only be mentioned. It is that determinism applies as rigidly to the mind as to the body. For Freud the word chance had no meaning, except in the scientist's sense.

Goodbye to Berlin
1939: Mr. Christopher Isherwood, whose collaboration with Mr. Auden in several volumes suggests that he is a poet by nature even if his work so far is in prose and drama, has collected a group of his sketches about pre-Nazi Germany.

Radio play upsets Americans
1938: A wireless dramatisation of Mr. H. G. Wells's fantasy, "The War of the Worlds" - a work that was written at the end of last century - caused a remarkable wave of panic in the United States during and immediately after its broadcast last night at eight o'clock.

Look, Stranger!
1936: "The world is out of joint, O cursed spite," &c., seems to be the basis of Mr. Auden's inspiration; he has decided things are so bad that poetry itself must change its nature: What can truth treasure, or heart bless, But a narrow strictness!

A Study of History
1934: It is safe to say that there can be few people for whom the reading of Mr. Toynbee's work will not be a deeply significant event. It would have struck the imagination of any age by its originality, its range, its learning, and its power, but it has a special interest for a time like ours, when the discomfort men feel on finding their world upside down drives them to one superficial and restless interpretation after another.

Brave New World
1932: There are few more brilliantly clever writers to-day than Mr. Aldous Huxley. Yet the title which he gave to one of his earlier books, "These Barren Leaves," is applicable to very much that he has written.

The Castle
1930: Kafka has not till now been offered to English readers. He died of consumption five years ago at the age of 42, leaving various unfinished MSS. behind him, which he desired his executor to destroy. "The Castle" was one of them. It is an allegorical novel; in which, however, imagination and reality are to closely crossed that there is hardly a sentence one may not suspect of two intentions.

Swallows and Amazons
1930: Children's books are probably the most difficult of all to write; they are certainly the most difficult to review. For children alone can properly judge their worth, and children, very wisely, never review. An adult has to refer back to his own childhood and ask himself: Would I have enjoyed such a book then? The answer, in the case of "Swallow and Amazons," is very definitely, Yes.

A Farewell to Arms
1929: There is something so complete in Mr. Hemingway's achievement in "A Farewell to Arms" that one is left speculating as to whether another novel will follow in this manner, and whether it does not complete both a period and a phase.

Mr Yeats's Nobel Prize
1929:The inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland have just seen Mr. W B Yeats victoriously flashing past the post, as the sporting reports say, for the Nobel Prize for Literature, a guerdon of the value of about £7,500.

The burial of Thomas Hardy
1928: The burial of Thomas Hardy in Westminster Abbey was in effect a sufficient answer to his own philosophy. It was a strange spectacle touched with something of the bleak irony of a scene from his own Dynasts.

Decline and Fall
1928: Mr. Waugh is funny, with that mingling of worldly wisdom and bunkum which is the ne plus ultra of your masterly undergraduate.

A Passage to India
1924: The first duty of any reviewer is to welcome Mr. E. M. Forster's reappearance as a novelist and to express the hope that the general public as well as the critics will recognise his merits and their good fortune.

Jacob's Room
1922: Extracts from reviews of Mrs. Woolf's previous books are provided very generously by the publisher, and it is commonly agreed that she is interesting.

Delusion and Dream
1921: In this remarkable book there lies at least a double interest. There is, in the first place, a longish short story of unusual merit and charm, retained in spite of translation, and, in the second, Professor Freud's commentary on it from the psycho-analytic standpoint, a brilliant and ingenious treatment of the story as a narrative of real happenings.

Women in Love
1921: The principal defect of this book is that it is difficult to read. It is full of absurdities; but Mr. Lawrence, although he may occasionally repel by egotism, has at least the courage which leads him to risk absurdity for the sake of what he holds to be the truth.

The Age of Innocence
1920: The Novelist who is faced with a simple problem of personal renunciation conceived as the theme of a tale has several anxious choices to make.

Wilfred Owen's Poems
1920: Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, M.C., an officer of the Manchester Regiment, was killed in action on the Sambre Canal a week before the Armistice, aged 25. The twenty-three poems of this collection are the fruit of not quite two years' active service, less than half of it in the field.

The Moon and Sixpence
1919: The character of a man insensible to ordinary human relations, who lives the life of pure selfishness which is sometimes supposed to produce great art, has always had its fascination for novelists inspired only by the unusual.

Dickens on film
1917: The film of "Oliver Twist," which is shown at the Oxford Picture House this week, gives us the best and almost the worst of what the kinema can do. Even ardent admirers of Dickens will probably admit that there is in his story a good deal of crude sensationalism. Upon this the kinema seizes with avidity.

Sons and Lovers
1913: "Odi et amo" should have been on the title-page of Mr. D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. On the whole, the book may be said to contrast filial and maternal love with the kind of love which is called amour. A good many amours are described, involving several markedly diverse persons; but all the affairs and all the persons are unanimous in one matter - whatever kind of love it may be, some kind of hate is mixed up in it.

Howard's End
1910: Howards End, by EM Forster, is a novel of high quality written with what appears to be a feminine brilliance of perception.

Death of Algernon Charles Swinburne
1909: With deep regret we announce the death of Mr. Swinburne, which took place on Saturday morning at Putney. Here he had lived since the early eighties in almost complete retirement, in the house of his friend Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton.

Where Angels Fear to Tread
1905: Where Angels Fear to Tread is not at all the kind of book that its title suggests. It is not mawkish or sentimental or commonplace. The motive of the story, the contest over the possession of a child between the parent who survives and the relatives of a parent who is dead, is familiar and ordinary enough, but the setting and treatment of this motive are almost startlingly original.

The Sea Wolf
1904: Mr. Jack London's The Sea Wolf is the kind of book that is generally over-praised, and we shall try not to over-praise it.

Mr Rudyard Kipling's new book
1902:One's first feeling after reading quickly the book of stories that Mr. Kipling publishes to-day is one of disappointment. The Kipling taste is in your mouth, but it is dilute Kipling; you are inclined to grumble at being put off with tobacco so heavily watered and spirits so much below proof. Was it for this that our literature was enriched with the smell of the smokeroom? Why, this scarcely smells at all.

Tragic death of M. Zola
1902: M. Emile Zola was this morning found dead in his house from accidental asphyxiation. The death of M. Zola appears to have been caused by poisonous gases emitted from a stove, the pipe of which is stated to have fitted badly. It is believed that the doctors will be able to save the life of Madame Zola, who was also affected by the noxious vapour.

Memorial notices: Mr Oscar Wilde
1900: Mr. Oscar Wilde died at Paris last Friday, in his forty-fifth year. Wilde's life is one of the saddest in English literature. His abilities were sufficient to win him an honoured place as a man of letters, but they struggled in vain against his lack of character.