Review by Liz Dexter Grayson Perry has achieved the status of National Treasure in the hearts and minds of a large proportion of the British public, writing and broadcasting on…
Review by Rebecca Foster From the Cape of Good Hope to the Arctic Circle, Dee tracks the spring as it travels north. From first glimpse to last gasp, moving between…
Softback review by Liz Dexter This quietly stunning book will appeal to anyone interested in art, landscape, walking, geology, geography, maps and ancient monuments. Deceptively simple paintings reveal both the…
Review by Peter Reason In 2013, a spring storm uncovered, on the shores of Norfolk, the oldest traces of humanity discovered outside Africa: fossil footprints made by early humans 850,000…
Reviewed by Harriet As I’m sure you’ve noticed, this year marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wordsworth, one of England’s most celebrated poets, much loved by many (apart,…
Translated by Stephen Twilley Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies An adjective frequently applied to Curzio Malaparte is ‘colourful’. To the Cambridge dictionary it means ‘vivid, rich, or distinctive in character’, and…
Review by Hayley Anderton I know it’s not the easiest time to get baking supplies, or books, or enough exercise to work off the baking that you can do, but…
Review by Liz Dexter First of all a caveat, in case any keen-eyed reader finds my name in the acknowledgements: I did work on this book in my professional capacity,…
The Wellcome Book Prize is on hiatus this year – we really hope it’ll return in 2021 as this unique prize, which celebrates literature with health, illness and medicine themes,…
The Wellcome Book Prize is on hiatus this year – we really hope it’ll return in 2021 as this unique prize, which celebrates literature with health, illness and medicine themes,…
Review by Liz Dexter “What makes a successful conversation?” is a question David Crystal considers asking people in his new book – and, well, how would you answer that question?…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to see Lucy Jones at Hungerford Town…
Translated from Polish by Bill Johnston Review by Peter Reason Stanisław Łubieński first began observing birds in childhood through Soviet binoculars. Later, he took his hobby to a more serious…
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 agonising decision about whether to shelve…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
