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
It's un-British to doubt the Bard these days: historical truth and myth-making catch the light in this scintillating study of our attitudes towards our unifying national treasure.
A compelling personal introduction to the life and work of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz by his compatriot and fellow exile Eva Hoffman. The predominant themes here ar... read more
Several of the principal compilers of the OED have already been sung - not least the editor James Murray, who took over two decades to reach the letter 'T'. It is his newly-discovered addres... read more
A sharp scrutiny of the recent literary phenomenon by the emeritus Professor of Modern English at UCL makes clear the distinction between responsible warnings and censorship, as well as expo... read more
The Firebird, Baba Yaga and their cohorts of human, divine and supernatural beings: an enjoyable mix of stories from the Carpathians with analysis of their traditional context. Illustrated ... read more
To celebrate the 25th birthday of this eccentric institution: a second volume of interviews drawn from the FT's archives of the last five years. What's on the menu is always just as enthrall... read more
Whether in music, architecture, economics, art, mathematics, physics or philosophy - Vienna in the early C20th led the world. This astonishing vibrancy was dispersed by Nazism and WW2 to the... read more
No two surviving copies of the First Folio are identical; of the original 750 only 200 survive. The British Library has five copies of which only one is complete. This is its facsimile. Clot... read more
A literary inquiry into the peculiar intimacy of infections, the slippery relationship between ourselves and foreign bodies. Who knew that something called 'the poetics of infection' could e... read more
A vast array of material is expertly woven together in this illuminating look at embattled authors and their literature: Anne Frank, Orwell, Biggles...
A collection of the late Mantel's essays and journalism spanning four decades, including her 2017 Reith Lectures. Sheis eloquent and ironic company always; her range of subjects is vast and ... read more
Iridescent, funny, subversive, endlessly surprising, sharp as a wind cutting in from the North Sea: many will know Barker's startlingly good writing from her only novel O Caledonia. Here are... read more
A collection of diary entries, essays and reflections from the American poet and scholar. Wang is one of the foremost writers on race, prisons and political surveillance. These writings - br... read more
Quietism perhaps, rather than the silence of things not being talked about: the art of listening, of stilling the interior babble. By the writer, painter and traveller who set up the Travel ... read more
Essays, some illustrations, and an alluring index: in 'B' alone you'll find Charles Babbage, Pauline Baynes, burial chamber (neolithic), blue colour, brightness, Louise Bourgeois, boredom, b... read more
The 40-year relationship between the prodigious writer and scholar (biographer of Gandhi, amongst other things, and a JS customer) and his original editor at Oxford University Press.
A rich study of the gulf between Hardy's fictional women, with whom he seems to have empathised, and the real women around him... who needed a certain hardiness (?) in their troubled relatio... read more
Contacts and connections as the drivers of cultural change: the West was built on far more than the values of ancient Greece and Rome, as per the Victorian paradigm. Erudite and compelling.