Heaney's translations from Old and Middle Irish, Italian (both medieval and modern), classical Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Romanian, German - and this is not a complete list. A staggerin... read more
Trust in the elusive and mysterious beast that is the British constitution relies on the decency of our politicians. As a nation, we have perhaps been complacent about the erosion of our his... read more
Flemish collaboration in WW2, by the author of War and Turpentine, who bought an old house in Ghent only to discover, after twenty years, that a previous occupant was an SS officer. Hertmans... read more
The biographer and poet (who is also an editor at Faber & Faber) explores the context of Eliot's poem through historical fragments, diaries and new research. Hollis' biography of Edward Thom... read more
George Balanchine’s spanned the twentieth century. He was a choreographer who trained in Tsarist St Petersburg and reached the peak of his career in New York during the Cold War. This is m... read more
A biography of Marguerite Steinheil (1869-1954), who ascended the social ladder in Belle Epoque Paris on the rungs of many lovers, until a night in May 1908 when her husband and mother were ... read more
From the Persian sack in 614AD to the end of the Crusaders. Hosler argues that despite horrific acts of violence, the medieval period is also one of tolerance, when the city's conquerors oft... read more
Another little Everyman hardback, just the thing for a pocket... in addition to poems by Alice Oswald, Walt Whitman, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver and many anglophone poets, this is a truly int... read more
The author (an extremely active American lawyer) guides us through her own eclectic collection, from an ancient Chinese horse sculpture to a metal snail from a hardware store. Most of us wou... read more
The overturning of Newtonian physics in the C20th by Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, et alia. Translated from the German.
A sumptuous reprint of d'Hancarville's catalogue of Hamilton's Greek vases, with its fabulous hand-coloured engraved plates splendidly reproduced. First published in Naples in the 1760s, the... read more
Susanna, a stylish self-made woman and arch-observer of her Viennese neighbours, has secrets of her own to hide in the years before WWI. A more grown-up and melancholic novel than Ibbotson's... read more
A piece of lively entertainment from the former MP, cabinet minister and memoirist. A foreign office chap disappears in Crete without trace - well, almost none - just enough in fact to feed ... read more
From the Alps to the Adriatic, through Ferrara, Mantova, Parma, Cremona, Pavia and Turin. Those who read Helena Attlee's recent Lev's Violin will know something of its historical use, but no... read more
The life of the black Georgian composer and abolitionist (1729-1780), thrillingly imagined. Born on a slave ship, his owner gave him, as a two-year-old, to three sisters living in Greenwich.... read more