The city’s great chronicler hit the streets to cure his insomnia. His writing cast a spell on me and now I go for nocturnal walks of my own

Characterisation and a sense of place have been sacrificed for a magical realist atmosphere in Peter Ackroyd’s latest novel, Three Brothers

Finally, Birmingham has the library it deserves, and its predecessor will be thankfully turned to rubble

David Jones’s service at the front inspired an epic poem about World War I, “In Parenthesis”. Long neglected, it is ripe for rediscovery

We may mock the Young Conservatives of the Fifties but they were unswervingly loyal and a formidable electoral force