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
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
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.
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
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