IT has lately become a fashion to speak of realism, so called, as if it were a recent discovery or invention, like the telephone or the electric light. Realism in literature and art has always existed ...

We’ve waited seven years for Zadie Smith’s NW, the same number of years it took Joseph O’Neill to write Netherland and for Tom McCarthy to place Remainder with a mainstream publisher. It’s been four ...

— Realism in literature can never be on exactly the same footing with realism in pictorial art. The painter must strive to paint merely what the tree suggests to him, because, not being a tree himself ...

I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at the age of thirty under intense, unshared, personal stress, and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the… ...