Reviewed by Hayley Anderton When Shiny New Books asked me if I’d like to review The New Sylva I thought it sounded interesting. When it arrived I thought it looked interesting and…
Reviewed by Claire If I were knowingly heading into an active theatre of war, I like to think I would go armed with the necessary information, wardrobe, and exit plan…
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,…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When Jerry Seinfeld remarked that ‘There is no such thing as fun for all the family’, he could have had the Sackville-Wests in mind. In the…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell My first encounter with Alan Lightman was through his 1992 novel Einstein’s Dreams, a fictional account of the scientist during the period he was working on the…
Translated by Soren A. Gauger and Guy Torr Reviewed by Karen Langley The boundaries and allegiances in Europe moved and blurred continually during the early 20th century, and many writers…
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…
Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a famous and fascinating book, and I think anyone interested in the Great War, or the wider question of how wars begin, would find…
Translated by Andrew Brown Reviewed by Jean Morris The media were full of the D-Day commemorations as I read this book – stories of wartime fear and bravery that I’d…
Reviewed by Claire When you are the inspiration for one of the most famous and best-loved children’s books of all time, how do you grow up? How do you set…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine If I were to make a list of things I probably wouldn’t want to read a book about, aeroplanes, cars, baseball and finance would be somewhere near…
Reviewed by Simon Thomas Are you ready to be transported back to postwar Europe? Although this collection of essays was first published as Pleasures and Landscapes as recently as 2003, they are…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When this memoir begins, Joanna Rakoff is 23 and has just dropped out of her graduate literary program in London and returned to New York, declaring…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Dictatorship of the Average This place’ll be a paradise tomorrow. And in every department there’ll be a supervisor with a sub-machine gun. – from ‘Mao Tse…
By Max Dunbar A decade or so into his career as a bestselling novelist, horror writer Stephen King ran into problems. He was drinking constantly and taking cocaine, banging out…
Reviewed by Denise Kong In 2007 Lilian Pizzichini “had it all”. She’d worked at The Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review, won the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger for non-fiction with her first…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine No author of the present day has been at once so much read, so much admired and so much abused. So wrote the New Monthly Review…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a messy, bloody conflict in which Spanish Republicans fought to save their country from the forces of Fascism, foreshadowed the Second…
Review by Simon Thomas What do you know about A. A. Milne? Your answer might be a little different if you’ve read our Five Fascinating Facts – or, indeed, if you’ve followed…
Reviewed by Victoria Best The best kind of non-fiction, I think, shows us how supposedly ‘average’ ordinary lives are really quite extraordinary. In the author’s foreward to his outstanding book…
Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson For several decades, Jonathan Meades has been a well-established writer, cultural critic of primarily food & architecture and broadcaster in Britain. He has such a…
Reviewed by Victoria Best When I was sitting my A levels back in 1987, my school thought itself very advanced because it gave us all a careers questionnaire to fill…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Some readers will have seen the rather excellent film An Education, based upon an episode in veteran journalist Lynn Barber’s life as a teenager where she fell…
Reviewed by Simon Thomas I’m going to be honest, when I picked up a biography a little-known turn-of-the-century poet, I wasn’t expecting it to be a page turner. I’d never read…
