Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Review by Peter Reason There has been a lot of interest recently in the idea of ‘rewilding’, expressed for example in Isabella Tree’s Wilding: The return of nature to a…
She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman
Reviewed by Harriet What an enticing title! Made even more so by the sub-title, ‘British Women in India’. Katie Hickman, who herself led a peripatetic life as the daughter of…
A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen by Martin Gayford and David Hockney
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This is a new ‘compact’ edition of this book, with a revised final chapter bringing it all up to date, and reproductions of three new David…
Drinking French by David Lebovitz
Review by Hayley Anderton Before everything started to close down the books I had been particularly anticipating, ordering, and reading, were mostly food and drink titles. Looking at them stacked…
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…
James Joyce by Edna O’Brien
Review by Rob Spence Edna O’Brien’s position as one of the most significant modern Irish writers is undisputed, and here, in this reissue of her 1999 short biography, she tackles…
The Author’s Effects by Nicola J. Watson
Reviewed by Harriet This splendid and fascinating book – subtitled ‘On Writer’s House Museums’ – has been a long time in the making, and is certainly none the worse for…
Red Sixty Seven, curated by Kit Jewitt
Review by Peter Reason When I was a small boy, back in the 1950s, I remember going on Sunday School trips to the seaside. Once we were out of London,…
Square Haunting by Francesca Wade
Review by Karen Langley “Square Haunting” was published to much fanfare and acclaim recently; a book which looks at the lives of five notable women centred around a specific Bloomsbury…
Veronica by Veronica Lake
Reviewed by Harriet I wonder how many people today have even heard of Veronica Lake. There was a time, though a relatively brief one, in which she was widely celebrated,…
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…
Learning Languages in Early Modern England by John Gallagher
Review by Liz Dexter Has it ever struck you that before England obtained its empire, no one else in the world bothered to speak the language? Did you realise what…
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 Henry James, there were sneers aplenty…
Art Essentials: Impressionism by Ralph Skea
Review by Liz Dexter Another volume in the excellently done Art Essentials series, this volume on Impressionism is written by Ralph Skea, an artist and academic who has published several…
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…
Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
Review by Peter Reason I have on my desk three pieces of rock, collected during my ecological pilgrimage on in the west coast of Scotland, that I wrote about in…
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 to over the course of human…
Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas
Review by Anna Hollingsworth My immediate reaction was a desperately deep sigh when, pre-launch, Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis was trumpeted as a must-read revelatory work on the fashion industry. Surely anyone…
Galileo’s Error: A New Science of Consciousness by Philip Goff
Review by Peter Reason This is a book about the philosophical perspective of panpsychism, written by a leading academic advocate. Panpsychism is an awkward word, not part of everyday vocabulary….
Home Work by Julie Andrews
with Emma Walton Hamilton Review by Annabel Julie Andrews’s first volume of memoir, Home, told us of her childhood, growing up during the war, and her early career on stage in…
Violencia – A New History of Spain: Past, Present and the Future of the West, by Jason Webster
Review by Michael Eaude. Jason Webster takes a long, long view of Spanish history. Most history books concentrate on small chunks of time: this or that war; or a defined…
How to Read a Photograph: Understanding, Interpreting and Enjoying the Great Photographers by Ian Jeffrey
Review by Liz Dexter Of course, reading a photograph is subjective – there are not really any rules for what makes a photograph great or why a particular person will…
The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden
Reviewed by Peter Reason The Summer Isles is an account of a single-handed voyage from the south coast of England round the west of Ireland and on to the northwest…