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.
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
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?.
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