'Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s and 1930s, he peerlessly described how Berlin's 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution.'

'"You can't write a novel," she said. But, at last, I have' - Craig Raine details the lengthy birth pains of his fiction debut

Hugh Trevor Roper was the greatest historical stylist of the 20th century. Yet he never produced a masterpiece to rival that of his great hero and predecessor, Edward Gibbon

Allan Massie salutes Sir Walter Scott, master of historical fiction and author of among others, Rob Roy and Waverley