Polly Barton’s candid interviews question the interpersonal dynamics – shame, embarrassment, jealousy, ethics – of pornography

A new book by Jay David Bolter chronicles the demise of cultural gatekeeping

Paying tribute to W.G. Sebald’s literature of memory and loss, two decades after his lectures on the Allied fire-bombing of German cities

A new collection of short stories by Maija Timonen asks: are we living in an age of emotional, as well as economic, austerity?

In America, Kilroy isn’t an orange-faced, platitude-spewing talk-show host turned failed UK Independence Party politician. He’s the ubiquitous reincarnation of James J. Kilroy, a Second World War shipyard inspector in Massachusetts, whose signature stamp - which denoted a successfully completed inspection - was appropriated by soldiers and satirically daubed across just about any surface they came into contact with. Somewhere along the line he acquired a nose and something resembling a face, and after the war was repatriated as urban graffiti. ‘Kilroy Was Here’ was a meme; the Internet was still half a century away.

On Eric Hobsbawm's Fractured Times

When I was ten I decided it would be a good idea to read the Oxford English Dictionary from beginning to end like a regular book. It would be terribly clever; plus, I’d learn all the words in the English language. Roundabout Albatross I abandoned the ridiculous endeavour. Two decades on, the opening chapters of 'The Truth About Art: Reclaiming Quality' (Zero Books, 2013) recalled the memory of that abortive exercise; such is the sheer pedantic exhaustiveness with which Patrick Doorly guides us through a semantic genealogy of the word ‘art’ – from Confucius and Plato to the philosophers of the 20th century, via Hegel and Rousseau – in the hope of arriving at its essence.