Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wilderness by Alastair Humphreys
We have just this one tiny planet to live on, now and for the foreseeable future. We must care for it, and use its resources wisely, sustainability, and fairly. If…
Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides, by Paul Clements
Review by Liz Dexter My hope is that this biography will send readers back to Jan Morris’s books, to either reread them of, for those who have yet to discover…
A Year and a Day by Phillip Lopate
Review by Karen Langley The coming of the Internet and the development of blogging at the turn of the 21st century led to a resurgence of the personal essay, which…
The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan
Review by Karen Langley There has been a resurgence of interest in the fiction writing of author Maeve Brennan recently, with her short stories in particular having gained much critical…
Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent, by Judi Dench
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long If I had my way every single teacher in the land who is attempting to teach Shakespeare should have a copy of this to hand as,…
You’re All Talk: Why We Are What We Speak by Rob Drummond
Review by Lix Dexter This is a book about the relationship between how we speak and who we are. More precisely, it’s a book about the role of spoken language,…
The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small, by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Even if the ‘Rewilding your Garden’ chapter seems the only one of practical use to you – or, indeed, if you only have a window box…
A Date with Language by David Crystal
Reviewed by Karen Langley Bodleian Library Publishing is an imprint attached to Oxford University which specialises in bringing out books that share the riches of the Bodley’s wide-ranging collections with…
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…
Once a King: The Lost Memoir of Edward VIII, by Jane Marguerite Tippett
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long The author of this book, Jane Marguerite Tippett, came across a previously unknown cache of letters, memoranda and notes written by the Duke of Windsor when she…
Portable Magic by Emma Smith
Reviewed by Liz Dexter If classic status is registered in material book form, the stages leading up to this are also readable across different editions of the same work. Rachel…
The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time by Catherine Taylor
Review by Annabel I’ve long followed Catherine Taylor on Twitter, where she has a straight-talking view of things literary and often political. A former publisher, she’s now a freelance writer,…
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…
Dearest Darling Sophie: Letters of George Devine, 1940-1945, edited by Harriet Devine
Review by Rob Spence Unless you are Tristram Shandy, you probably don’t know when and where you were conceived. If you are Harriet Devine, on the other hand, you know…
Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic, by Hugh Brody
Review by Peter Reason On the first page of Landscapes of Silence is a list of the many words for snow in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit hunters and…
A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, by Mark O’Connell
The Irish journalist Mark O’Connell’s books are particularly notable for his increasingly personal take on the subjects he is investigating. In his 2018 Wellcome Prize winner debut, To Be a…
Remainders of the Day by Shaun Bythell
Review by Julie Barham A further book recording life in all its humour and honesty, this is a brilliant read which captures so much from the perspective of Shaun Bythell,…
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
Review by Lory Widmer Hess In the expansive days of summer, what better book could there be to read than a classic of travel literature, Mark Twain’s career-making account 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…
Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science by Athene Donald
Review by Liz Dexter This book is written for anyone who is wondering why, in spite of decades of effort to promote change, the numbers of women pursuing careers in…
Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book by Emma Smith
Review by Liz Dexter In stressing users of the First Folio, then, this book is not concerned with the discussions of how the Folio came to be published, the provenance…
Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall
Review by Liz Dexter The history of women’s words, it turns out, is full of surprises, of things which aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. Even our basics have unfamiliar beginnings….
My Life and I, by Betty Bendell
Reviewed by Harriet One of the problems with bounding spontaneously through life, I’ve discovered, is that people do tend to react to me quite strongly. I’d like to say that…
Dockland: Smokestacks and Slums: In the Shadows of British Industry, by Cedric Greenwood
Reviewed by Gill Davies I was intrigued by the title of this book, which didn’t announce itself as a traditional industrial history, and by its format – it looks rather…