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?.
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 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.
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.
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...
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
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
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
A memoir of life as a small girl in Rabindranath Tagore's famous cultural community in the 1930s, by one of India's foremost literary figures. Translated from the Bengali. (Originally due fo... 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
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.
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
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 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
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.
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
Entertaining and intriguing - if the dear reader can be persuaded to overlook the fatuous and needy title and its horrid, self-promoting exclamation mark.
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
This eloquent little book offers a moving and erudite justification for the survival of high quality book shops and why they are essential places of discovery, refuge and fulfilment. Laced w... read more
With considerable humility, this book is subtitled In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading and Life. Actually it's the brilliant Saunders' own work, distilled from deca... read more
A facsimile, with facing transcriptions, of Eliot's early notebook containing poems up to 1917. Includes an early version of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The notebook has been lurk... read more
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.
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.