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Considering claims by David Bellos that Les Miserables was the greates novel of the 19th century, the article seeks to get to grips with the core attitudes of Hugo's novel and then puts them in relation both to the political and literary context of the time and to patterns of behaviour in Hugo's own life. It suggests that in fact the book is crucial above all in consolidating the ever stronger relationship between liberal politics and success and celebrity in the arts.

The article examines the way Coetzee positions himself toward the world and his readers and how this helps us to understand the unusual style of his autobiographical trilogy. Essentially it argues that the structure of Coetzee's work is driven by his difficulty assuming a stable position relative to certain political and social issues.

This is a completely new translation of Machiavelli's "The Prince" in a modern English that seeks to give the straightforward immediacy of the original; it comes complete with a long introduction describing the genesis of the original, its history in English editions and its influence on English literature. In particular it considers Machiavelli's interest in the psychology of leadership and the meshing of different personalities with different historical circumstances. There is also an extended analysis of translation problems related to the text with particular attention to those problems that arise from the text's extraordinary reputation. Various translations are analysed, showing how translators have been influenced by expectations of what Machiavelli said, sometimes ignoring what is actually written.

A consideration of narrative structure and political opportunism in the work of Anne Enright, who won the Booker Prize in 2007 with the novel The Gathering, a work of fiction whose plot eventually turns on a question of child molestation and which frequently brings together a very 'literary' sense of how novels should proceed (symbolism, flashbacks, lexical games) with an awareness of the public interest in this particular crime. The question the article seeks to raise is how we can distinguish mere contrivance from real achievement.

An account of the Medici bank, the role of the family as financiers, politicians and patrons of the arts