July 13, 2021 A Vertical Art – Oxford Lectures by Simon Armitage Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, 90 per cent of people said that they’d read a novel in the…
July 6, 2021 Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, by Sarah LeFanu Review by Helen Parry Reconstructing anyone’s life poses enormous difficulties, for however copious the evidence of letters, diaries, journals, and eye-witness accounts, the problem…
June 7, 2021 Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden Review by Liz Dexter The processes of selection, acquisition and cataloguing, as well as of disposal and retention, are never neutral acts. They are…
May 27, 2021 Reviewer’s Choice: Twentieth Century Paris (1900-1950) – A Literary Guide for Travellers by Marie-José Gransard While Shiny New Books concentrates on the new, occasionally, we give our reviewers room to share previously published – ie: ‘not Shiny New Books’…
May 4, 2021 The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn Reviewed by Rob Spence Lucy Newlyn is a intriguing literary figure. She had a career as an Oxford don, publishing well-regarded studies of Romantic…
April 20, 2021 Commemorative Modernisms by Alice Kelly Review by Rob Spence Modernism has always resisted precise definition, and in recent years it has been normal in literary-critical circles to use the…
April 1, 2021 Hyphens & Hashtags* by Claire Cock-Starkey Reviewed by Liz Dexter Subtitled “The stories behind the symbols on our keyboards” (the subtitle linked to the main title via an asterisk rather…
December 1, 2020 Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the world by Mark Aldridge Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was younger and read every Agatha Christie book I could lay my hands on, she always produced a…
November 12, 2020 The Secret Life of Books: Why They Mean More than Words by Tom Mole Paperback review by Liz Dexter Tom Mole, as Professor of English Literature and Book History at the University of Edinburgh, is certainly qualified to…
November 5, 2020 The Artful Dickens by John Mullan Reviewed by Harriet Professor John Mullan’s name will be familiar to many readers: he writes regularly in the Guardian and the London Review of…
August 20, 2020 The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven Reviewed by Liz Dexter As you would expect from an Oxford Illustrated History of … this is a sumptuous production, world-wide in scope and…
August 11, 2020 Cover by Peter Mendelsund Reviewed by Harriet Ed’s Note: Six years after its publication in hardback, Mendelsund’s Cover gets a paperback release, so we are reposting Harriet’s original…
April 9, 2020 A Bite of the Apple by Lennie Goodings Review by Simon There’s a certain variety of person who can always spot a bottle-green spine at a hundred paces, and has faced the…
February 6, 2020 Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin by Clive James Review by Karen Langley My love of the poetry of Philip Larkin is no secret; I’ve written about him numerous times on my own…
January 30, 2020 Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide, by Barry Forshaw Review by Basil Ransome-Davies When I started teaching popular fiction courses forty years ago, having always been more drawn to Jesse James than to…
January 23, 2020 Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor Review by Gill Davies Women read a lot more fiction than men; they also buy more books, attend writers’ events, blog, exchange ideas, and…
December 5, 2019 Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories in Cultural History – Catherine Belsey Review by Hayley Anderton Tales of the weird have a deep hold on our collective imagination, and of all the things we’ve given credence…
October 1, 2019 Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell Review by Simon As the cover of Confessions of a Bookseller tells us, Bythell is an international bestseller. A couple of years ago, The…
October 23, 2018 Books do furnish a Painting by Jamie Camplin & Maria Ranauro Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Thames and Hudson have got form for publishing tempting books that combine art and literature – Eric Karpeles Paintings in…
September 20, 2018 Mrs Gaskell & Me: Two Women, Two Love Stories, Two Centuries Apart By Nell Stevens Reviewed by Rebecca Foster It started with a misreading of some nineteenth-century handwriting. In 2013 Nell Stevens began a PhD at King’s College, London….
March 15, 2018 Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan Review by Liz Dexter This is a truly delightful book which is a MUST if you’re a 35-55 year old British person and a…
January 30, 2018 Science Fiction: A Literary History edited by Roger Luckhurst Reviewed by Annabel Once upon a time SF was a subculture haunted by small populations of nerds and geeks. Star Wars (1977) changed that,…
January 18, 2018 In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes by Giorgio van Straten Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is an engaging book about other books, but it makes no judgements on them, and nor can we express,…
December 7, 2017 The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler Review by Annabel While I can’t claim to read anywhere near the volume of old and newly reprinted novels that some of my Shiny…
December 5, 2017 A History of Children’s Books in 100 Books by Roderick Cave and Sarah Ayad Reviewed by Harriet Earlier this year I reviewed Martin Edwards’ Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, and very good it was too. So…
