Two cheers because only Love deserves three... Forster - that great humanist and sublime prose stylist - advocated "curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race... read more
A dazzling critical history of games and game theory, ancient and modern, by a neuroscientist who, alongside stints at MIT, Berkeley and UCL, claims to have 'spent her childhood being repeat... read more
How did Oxford colleges, chapels, pubs, societies, nooks and crannies inspire Lewis and his friends? By the Professor of English Language and Literature at Magdalen. Some illustrations.
In 1942, aged 24, the great and defiant Canetti began to write notes, aphorisms and meditations about death - he was dead against it - and, by extension, about and for life; he only stopped... read more
A memoir by this most communicative classicist about her own experiences of suicide, and how she found consolation and understanding of herself and her family through close readings of clas... read more
From the earliest printing to C21st zines: a very engaging account. The author is Prof of Eng Lit at Balliol when not noodling about with like-minded eggheads and a Model 4 letter press.
Abdurraqib's meditation on Black music and performance, A Little Devil in America, was inspired. This new book, a literary memoir about basketball and what it takes to be successful, what it... read more
Like a detective novel of the time, the story of two booksellers who uncovered the forgeries of a pompous bastion of the literary scene in 1930s' London.
Yes, this is a book on how to read the first Book of the Bible - from one of the world's truly luminous novelists, the Calvinist author of Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack.
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.
Looks back to a group of brave women in the later C18th and onwards - at a time when women had no property and no rights: Elizabeth Montagu, who took on Voltaire and won; Catherine Macauley,... read more
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
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.
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
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