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
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
The Booker Prize winner reflects on her long journey to literary fame, and how her personal experience is bound up in Britain's complex racial and colonial past.
Ambrose Bierce, Robert Aickman, Tove Jansson, Alexander Pushkin, Henry James, Emily Brontë et al - an anthology of stories and excerpts from around the world. A new addition to the attracti... read more
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
The acronym stands for 'Poets, Essayists, Novelists'. This extraordinary organisation dedicated to freedom of expression was founded in 1921. Literature knows no frontiers...
A superb anthology of poems and prose based around the isles of Britain and Ireland, derived from the literary magazine Archipelago. Contributions from luminaries such as Heaney, Oswald, Lo... read more
Athena, Circe, Penelope, Helen et al.: female characters and narrators are given centre stage in this fine reworking of the familiar. By the author of Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman ... read more
Begins with a Perec epigraph: "De l'autobus, je regarde Paris" - and Elkin does, in a diary of vignettes about the 'infra-ordinary' (Perec again): fellow commuters, a diversion, a girl with ... 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 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 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
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
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.