An entertaining history of literary London during the Second World War focusing on Peter Watson & Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, but also including the Woolfs, Dylan Thomas, Julian McLar... read more
A wide ranging collection of essays and memoir from the US novelist exploring everything from her late blooming friendship with Tom Hanks, the inspiration she finds in Snoopy, and the joy of... read more
The last book by the late Italian Titan among writers and publishers is a typically idiosyncratic and compelling exploration of the Bible and its influence on Western civilisation. His broad... read more
The companion volume to Eliot's 2018 The Penguin Classics Book. A complete illustrated guide to every book - from Achebe to Zweig - published in Penguin's Modern Classics imprint.
The acronym stands for 'Poets, Essayists, Novelists'. This extraordinary organisation dedicated to freedom of expression was founded in 1921. Literature knows no frontiers...
A fascinating look at landscape from the aftermath of the Great War to the present, with a showstopping essay by Macfarlane. Unquiet nature, absence and presence, glimpses, tremors, unease a... read more
Davdison's feel for dusk first came our way with his wonderfully evocative book The Last of the Light: About Twilight. Here he produces a series of nocturnes about cities at night-fall, wint... read more
Charles Foster is one of those rare people who seem to cram several lives into their own allotted span while the rest of us just about manage one... Adopting a sort of method-acting approach... read more
An almanac from the Idler Academy founder that is full of ideas to bring on a ruddy glow. Just the thing for those who have fled the cities for the Good Life during the pandemic. It's hard t... read more
A sequence of lively anecdotes from a mercurial mind: Gekoski has led several careers, as a publisher and more recently as a fine novelist; he is also the doyen of dealers in rare modern fir... read more
A cultural history of ice and icy places, written between Northern Greenland and the Bodleian Library, in the Alps and at the Kinross Curling Club. NC, a poet, deftly blends memoir, literary... read more
A cultural history of ice and icy places, written between Northern Greenland and the Bodleian Library, in the Alps and at the Kinross Curling Club. NC, a poet, deftly blends memoir, literary... read more
Another themed anthology from Daunt Newest in the Daunt Books series (At the Pond, In the Kitchen), this brings together essays from various Sandoe's luminaries (Penelope Lively, Francesca W... read more
A delightful extended riff on books and reading from a man with various pseudonyms (Jennie Walker, Jack Robinson...). Its subtitle is 'A book about books, mostly. And bonfires, cliches, dyst... read more
An understanding and enquiring look at the demon drink and what it enables certain writers to achieve, and at what cost: Patrick Hamilton, Jean Rhys, Charles Jackson, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Th... read more
The controversial address to 3,500 psychoanalysts, at which he was booed off stage for asserting that the Academy needed to change their attitudes to gender.
OL gets under the skin of a dozen glamorous but stifled figures: Susan Sontag, Christopher Isherwood, Nina Simone... With a sympathetic eye, she explores the conditions needed to cultivate... read more
The author moved to Japan aged 21, immersing herself in language and culture with such success that she is now a literary translator. Her route there was by no means straightforward; this bo... read more
Bloom's last work, completed weeks before his death when he felt 'edged by nothingness' and consoled himself with readings from Montaigne, Blake, Dante, Shakespeare et al. Missed from our Xm... read more
A collection of canine poems... This genre in any medium gives us the shivers, but Oliver is such an outstandingly wonderful poet that we are going to risk it...
Post-war France through the despatches of Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, A J Liebling and others. This collection is the source for Wes Anderson's forthcoming film, 'The French Dispatch', and... read more
A clever and playful reworking of Wagner's 'Ring' that brings in the financial crisis of 2008; originally conceived as a libretto for the Berlin Opera.
First collection of the KOV's essays to be published in English. Wide-ranging - many subjects are northern, but not all - with his characteristic concentration on the navel. What would the C... 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' work, distilled from decade... read more
Sebald, an empty street in Italy, Cavafy, St Petersburg, Alexandria, Eric Rohmer, Proust and Pessoa: Aciman's essays roam through time, imagination, place and memory.
The last edition to be edited by the brilliant Francesca Wade (whose 'Square Haunting' also appears in this catalogue as a recent favourite). Contributors include Lydia Davies, Can Xue, Kris... read more
A new addition to this excellent reference series of slim, small paperbacks. The cardinal virtues, the heavenly virtues, the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas; virtues moral and intellectual;... read more
Comprises the 26 meditations that our former archbishop and thoroughly good egg wrote for his parishioners during the first wave of the pandemic. Thoughtful and wise.
A delicious anthology of ambling, strolling, pausing, looking, thinking... A feast that combines Joseph Roth and Rebecca Solnit, George Sand and Werner Herzog, Joseph Conrad and Kate Humble,... read more