April 21, 2020 Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works by David Crystal Review by Liz Dexter “What makes a successful conversation?” is a question David Crystal considers asking people in his new book – and, well,…
April 16, 2020 Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Back in early March, just before literary events started being cancelled due to coronavirus, I had the good fortune to…
April 14, 2020 The Birds They Sang: Birds and People in Life and Art by Stanisław Łubieński Translated from Polish by Bill Johnston Review by Peter Reason Stanisław Łubieński first began observing birds in childhood through Soviet binoculars. Later, he took…
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…
April 9, 2020 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:…
April 7, 2020 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…
April 7, 2020 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,…
April 2, 2020 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…
March 31, 2020 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…
March 17, 2020 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…
March 10, 2020 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…
March 5, 2020 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….
February 27, 2020 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…
February 13, 2020 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,…
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…
February 5, 2020 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…
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 28, 2020 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…
January 28, 2020 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…
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…
January 21, 2020 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…
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…
November 12, 2019 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…
November 7, 2019 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…
October 29, 2019 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…
