Two cheers because only Love deserves three... Forster - that great humanist and sublime prose stylist - advocated "curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race... read more
Travel memories - some imagined, such as a performance of 'Hamlet' off the African coast, in 1607 - from the amiable author of A Pike in the Basement: Tales of a Hungry Traveller.
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
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
A collection of diary entries, essays and reflections from the American poet and scholar. Wang is one of the foremost writers on race, prisons and political surveillance. These writings - br... read more
Iridescent, funny, subversive, endlessly surprising, sharp as a wind cutting in from the North Sea: many will know Barker's startlingly good writing from her only novel O Caledonia. Here are... read more
A collection of the late Mantel's essays and journalism spanning four decades, including her 2017 Reith Lectures. Sheis eloquent and ironic company always; her range of subjects is vast and ... read more
A Pulitzer Prize-winner's essays on musical greats who flourished again later in life: Leonard Cohen, Aretha Franklin, Patti Smith and many more. These are judicious and vivid portraits, som... read more
Linnaeus riding through Lapland; frost fairs on the Thames; courtship in the snow in Japan; Tove Jansson on her childhood; snippets of Beth Chatto. An anthology of wintry delights.
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
A sequence of essays about the Treaty that addressed the new Turkish state and the Middle East. At Versailles, before the rise of Ataturk, the West thought such matters had less claim on the... read more