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