David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine by Nicholas Royle
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…
Woman Much Missed by Mark Ford
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…
The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis
Review by Terence Jagger T S Eliot, when I read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, was my introduction to modernism as a reluctant and noisily sceptical schoolboy, and…
Fantasy: How it Works, by Brian Attebery
Review by Helen Parry Over the last thirty years, the genre of fantasy has become more ‘respectable’. Although it has never been simply an excuse for plodding, Lord-of-the-Rings, Sword-and-Sorcery knock-offs,…
The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein by Sharon Ruston
Review by Annabel Gaskell Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, her novel conceived during that momentous trip to Geneva in 1816 during ‘the year without a summer’, is supremely concerned with the subject…
Living and Dying With Proust, by Christopher Prendergast
Review by Rob Spence Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is seen as a kind of literary Everest, to be attempted only by the brave or…
Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics by Tom Keymer
Reviewed by Harriet Today, Jane Austen is regarded as one of the most important writers in the English language, often spoken of in the same sentence as Shakespeare. It wasn’t…
A Little History of Poetry by John Carey
Review by Rob Spence In 1935, the doyen of art critics, Ernst Gombrich, was a young, unemployed former student with a PhD in art history. He was commissioned by an…
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 blog, and most recently my encounter…
So Brightly at the Last by Ian Shircore
Review by Rob Spence In one important respect, this book was outdated at the moment it was published: its subject, Clive James, having endured a terminal illness for ten years,…
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 form reading groups. Helen Taylor’s research…
Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism, by Nathan Waddell
Review by Rob Spence When the newly-elected Brexit party MEPs took their place at the European Parliament in June, they used the opening ceremony as a stunt, turning their backs…
The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein
Reviewed by Harriet This enthralling multiple biography is subtitled ‘Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and the year that changed literature’. The year is 1922, and the claim…
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, … SF author Adam Roberts says…
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, even internally, our own views on…
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 when I spotted this one, also…
The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Nazim Dikbas Reviewed by Rob Spence Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate, is the kind of public intellectual that we need to cherish, especially in these dark days for his…
Latest Readings by Clive James
Reviewed by Simon I have to confess that when I picked up Latest Readings, I knew very little about Clive James’ life and work. And, indeed, when I put it down…
William Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction by Stanley Wells
Reviewed by Harriet How much can be said about the life and work of Shakespeare in just 135 pages? A surprising amount, in fact. Clearly these OUP Very Short Introductions…
Where I’m Reading From by Tim Parks
Reviewed by Annabel Many of us who are booklovers enjoy nothing more than reading a book about books. I’m familiar with Tim Parks through his novels, many of which I’ve…
The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot by Rebecca Mead
Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess No two readers can really read the same book. The nuances generated by our particular set of experiences, associations, and interests color our reading, making…
The Most Dangerous Book; The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham
Reviewed by Max Dunbar This study of how James Joyce’s Ulysses came to be published and set in type is almost as essential as the book itself. The odds were against it,…
Shakespeare & Me, edited by Susannah Carson
Reviewed by Simon Thomas A few years ago, I very much enjoyed A Truth Universally Acknowledged, an anthology of writers and readers celebrating Jane Austen, which was also edited by Susannah…
How to be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis
Reviewed by Jane Carter I was smitten as soon as I saw the title, but when I saw the cover—a pile of books is always a good thing and this…