Do the pram in the hall and other domestic tentacles make a life of intellectual fulfilment impossible? The author unravels the work of Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Ferrante, Zo... read more
Conversational, elegant and subtle essays on art, literature, urban life in war-time Shanghai and Hong Kong by the admired Chinese-born American novelist, screenwriter and cultural critic. F... read more
The Chinese-born novelist moved to Britain and then to the US. Her memoir glints with her fascination with the West as well as her nostalgia for the East.
Any book from SB is always eagerly awaited, this one no less than its marvellous predecessors How to Live: A Life of Montaigne and At The Existentialist Caf?.
Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. This is the story of John Heminges, Henry Cordell and others who comp... read more
Looks at the lives of Ryle, Austin, Anscombe and Murdoch and how they transformed moral philosophy in C20th Britain. No rose-tinted specs here, just the plainest tortoise-shell frames...
A new translation of the fundamental text of Daoism, much more dynamic than the comfortably gnomic ones of the past. Ziporyn restores its strangeness and philosophical challenges.
Scholarly but accessible approach to Thor, Odin et alia, the green myth of Yggdrasil and the darker one of Ragnarok, and the way these have been recast repeatedly. Some illustrations. A comp... read more
The literary fl?neur wanders amongst places and objects, images, film and ideas: a series of short, discursive essays that are the more brilliant for being unassuming.
A brilliant journey through a particular vein of literary history, from the C17th onwards. The Golden Treasury, General Wavell, Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Mersey Sound... rich pickings indee... read more
A magnificent book by Chaucer's biographer: the forthright, funny, dynamic character from the Canterbury Tales is compared with some real medieval women, and is also traced in the work of la... read more
This book of seven essays describes the Nobel laureate's intellectual journey from the "Marxism and Sartrean existentialism of my youth to the liberalism of my mature years." Adam Smith, Hay... read more
A collection of his journalism and essays on literature and writing, getting his typewriter fixed (presumably all modernists use typewriters, the better to make modernist metajokes), etc.
The title could pass off as a short story by M.R. James or as one of the exploits of Robert Louis Stevenson's little-known, rather Ruritanian sleuth called Prince Florizel. It is in fact a d... read more
Carey has been chief reviewer at the Sunday Times for over forty years. This new book is his own selection of his favourite books from the 1000+ that he has reviewed so far.
Creation stories, dragons, gods, demigods, the Queen Mother of the West, rivers, mountains; legends from Dunhuang, Buddhism, Daoism, etc. Illustrated. (By the late 1980s, most of these were... read more
A first collection of essays and journalism from the novelist best known for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Free speech, identity politics and intellectual imprisonment are all grist to Shrive... read more
Those familiar with the exquisite vagaries that have come from the pen of this author (also known as Jack Robinson and Jennie Walker) will rejoice at these 99 paragraphs observing and enjoyi... read more
A slim volume containing two dozen leaves: twelve are photographic studies by the great NM of dead leaves, "at the held, drawn-out stage of their metamorphosis", the moment when they curl in... read more
Admirably and endlessly discursive, the essayist explores Orwell's ideas of happiness and joy - 'the right to live, not just to exist' - that permeate his writing and which are exemplified b... read more
A collection of essays by the late traveller and acute observer of nature: "The central project of my adult life as a writer is to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others t... read more
An original and entertaining book on the smoke and mirrors of the modern consumer's world - case studies that take apart our ideas of the real and the fake, of appearance and deception.
LB could turn straw into gold. Here she describes chancing across the writings of a rather obscure Greek philosopher, and the wonders and illuminations that followed. Transformative.
This delightful slim volume consists of Newcomb's watercolours of still lives around the house & garden, accompanied by a few lines from Blackburn, her indefatigable Suffolk neighbour.
Argues that the physical form of books makes them distinctive, and sometimes dangerous, quite as much as their content. (John Morgan’s recent, limited edition Usylessly, with its beautiful... read more