Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jane Potter
Review by Rob Spence If you attended a British secondary school at any time from the late nineteen sixties until the present day, at some point you will have encountered…
Review by Rob Spence If you attended a British secondary school at any time from the late nineteen sixties until the present day, at some point you will have encountered…
The Futures Series from indie publisher Melville House UK recently launched with four titles that couldn’t be more different from each other: going from Songwriting, to Trust, to War Crimes…
Review by Rob Spence It’s not often that one gets the chance to begin a review with a boast, so I’ll get it over with now: I have read À…
Review by Liz Dexter I have […] tried to highlight how much our understanding of human origins has changed – and continues to change – and how, in some ways,…
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long There is a plethora of journalists who are labelled Royal Experts and I sometimes wonder how you reach these giddy heights, if that is how you…
Review by Rob Spence This is a curious little book, which shouldn’t really work, but does, offering the reader a delightful series of fresh impressions gleaned from the writer’s engagement…
We have just this one tiny planet to live on, now and for the foreseeable future. We must care for it, and use its resources wisely, sustainability, and fairly. If…
Review by Liz Dexter My hope is that this biography will send readers back to Jan Morris’s books, to either reread them of, for those who have yet to discover…
Review by Karen Langley The coming of the Internet and the development of blogging at the turn of the 21st century led to a resurgence of the personal essay, which…
Review by Karen Langley There has been a resurgence of interest in the fiction writing of author Maeve Brennan recently, with her short stories in particular having gained much critical…
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long If I had my way every single teacher in the land who is attempting to teach Shakespeare should have a copy of this to hand as,…
Review by Lix Dexter This is a book about the relationship between how we speak and who we are. More precisely, it’s a book about the role of spoken language,…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Even if the ‘Rewilding your Garden’ chapter seems the only one of practical use to you – or, indeed, if you only have a window box…
Reviewed by Karen Langley Bodleian Library Publishing is an imprint attached to Oxford University which specialises in bringing out books that share the riches of the Bodley’s wide-ranging collections with…
Review by Annabel I’ve very much enjoyed reading Nicholas Royle’s books, the novel An English Guide to Birdwatching (reviewed here, with a Q&A with Nicholas here), and then his memoir…
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long The author of this book, Jane Marguerite Tippett, came across a previously unknown cache of letters, memoranda and notes written by the Duke of Windsor when she…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter If classic status is registered in material book form, the stages leading up to this are also readable across different editions of the same work. Rachel…
Review by Annabel I’ve long followed Catherine Taylor on Twitter, where she has a straight-talking view of things literary and often political. A former publisher, she’s now a freelance writer,…
Reviewed by Harriet If you studied poetry at school or university, or just read it for pleasure, you may well recognise this book’s title as a quotation from one of…
Review by Rob Spence Unless you are Tristram Shandy, you probably don’t know when and where you were conceived. If you are Harriet Devine, on the other hand, you know…
Review by Peter Reason On the first page of Landscapes of Silence is a list of the many words for snow in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit hunters and…
The Irish journalist Mark O’Connell’s books are particularly notable for his increasingly personal take on the subjects he is investigating. In his 2018 Wellcome Prize winner debut, To Be a…
Review by Julie Barham A further book recording life in all its humour and honesty, this is a brilliant read which captures so much from the perspective of Shaun Bythell,…
Review by Lory Widmer Hess In the expansive days of summer, what better book could there be to read than a classic of travel literature, Mark Twain’s career-making account of…