The main link between 2014 and literature is, inevitably, the outbreak of the First World War and the war poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke. (Though a virtuoso technician, Brooke is nowadays held in less regard than the other two, as he depicted war as glorious, they…

If you write a biography of Oscar Wilde or George Bernard Shaw, as my friends Richard Ellmann and Michael Holroyd have respectively done, the books sell in America. My life of John Betjeman has been a top bestseller in Britain; but only a puny number of copies have sold in the United States. Why is…