"Library Lives: A Constellation of Books and Objects From the Rylands" plots the lifelong love affair between one particular bookworm and the John Rylands Library in Manchester, its collections drawn from every corner and period of the textual and me...

Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection "The Good European", the writings in "Zest" delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life?into manual work and "dolce far niente", into ancient vernacular...

When in March 2020 the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown Gabriel Josipovici decided that he would respond to a unique situation by writing an essay a day for a hundred days, prefacing each with a diary entry, keeping track...

"Poems and Satires" restores that wonder to view, while also revealing Millay as a more innovative and versatile talent than she is usually given credit for being. It includes some of her wickedly funny satires (published under the pseudonym Nancy Bo...

"Midnight in the Kant Hotel" is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop. Mengham is a significa...

Muriel Spark always regarded the Brontes with a novelist's eye. As Boyd Tonkin argues in his lively introduction, written for the new edition, the Brontes inspired Spark at the very beginning of her own career, but not in a straightforward way. Throu...

This is a book about remoteness: a memoir of places observed in solitude, of the texture of life through the quiet course of the seasons in the far north of Scotland. It is a book grounded in the singularity of one place - a house in northern Aberdee...

Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-c...

John Polidori (1795-1821) is a fascinating but always shadowy figure of Romanticism, an impetuous, sensitive writer of fierce talent. His encounter with Byron, Shelley and their circle has contributed both to his fame and notoriety on the one hand, a...

Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621) has cast a long, shimmering shadow, on Milton ("L'Allegro and Il Penseroso" in particular), on the wits of Queen Anne's reign and the beginning of George I's, and on Swift. Doctor Johnson praised it...