There has been plenty of commentary about concerning Charles Dickens, as it is the 200th year of his birth. Here is an entry, written back in 2006 at The Freeman, about him, which looks pretty interesting, and some of the comments (not all of which are very praiseworthy) are worth reading. I never really quite got into reading Dickens. At school, I had to study such books as Oliver Twist and David...

The government is planning to create a national reading competition in England to encourage a love of books and boost children's literacy.

The 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens's birth has prompted Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt to get his cabinet colleagues in the mood to celebrate one of Britain's greatest writers.

Leonard Peltier is a Native American serving his thirty-sixth year in prison. The events that led to arrest and the falsification of evidence used to convict him have long been highlighted by award-winning films like Michael Apted’s ‘Incident at Oglala’ and best-selling books such as Peter Matthiessen’s ‘In the Spirit of Crazy Horse’. Leonard was wrongfully...

Remember those Lib Dem calls for a mansion tax at the weekend? I said at the time that, ‘the Lib Dems appear to be drawing more attention to which of their own policies they are fighting for within government, whether those policies make it to the statute books or not.’ Well, now they're at it again. Nick Clegg is giving a speech this morning in which he'll urge George Osborn...

When I left school without the A levels that I needed to fulfil my academic dreams I was put on a job creation programme in my local library. I loved the scheme whilst it lasted! I learned more in those six months than I had learned in a previous lifetime of school. There was something almost magical in handling so many books. Even without reading them, just stamping a book with this book is the

Yes. This … … has finally moved out of my home, and out of my life. Last week, Men collected it and took it … I don't know here. A dump, presumably. I recently wrote here about the continuing life of physical books and about the limitations of the idea of the paperless office or paperless home. Office-working commenters piled in to describe the ...

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the controversial former head of the International Monetary Fund, is to address students at the Cambridge Union.

Not many books make such an impression that you can still remember the broad outline of their arguments three decades after reading them. But the second edition of Tom Nairn’s ‘The Break Up of Britain’, published in 1982, was very much the work that has shaped my thinking on nationalism with the British Isles ever

Manufacturers ended 2011 with their worst quarter since Britain was in the grip of recession, although the pace of contraction slowed in December. The closely watched Markit Purchasing Managers Index survey, which asks manufacturers about their output and order books, showed a reading of 49.6 last month — an improvement on the 47.7 recorded in