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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
Review by Liz Dexter These are all menders and remakers working in collaboration with nature. They understand that as humans we are part of the natural world and that we…
Review by Karen Langley M. John Harrison is a writer who’s been pushing the boundaries of fiction for decades; from his early sci fi works, through the fantasies (or are…
Review by Peter Reason The late Barry Lopez is regarded by many as the doyen of travel and nature writers – although he and many others dislike these terms, preferring…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton This is a book I’ve been anticipating for a couple of years. I think I first heard about it via Stephen Rutt, a nature writer I…
Reviewed by Harriet Nowadays, when most people hear the term street food, they will be thinking about the emergence in the past ten or so years of a wonderful range…
Reviewed by Helen Parry Not every writer lives a particularly interesting life (it is, after all, for their sitting down and imagining things that we value them) and not every…
Review by Annabel North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies In my first, diagnostic year at Sussex there was a required course in Philosophy. Turned out to be Brit logical positivism. Allegedly to help recent…
Translated by Helen Weaver and Leo Raditsa Reviewed by Rob Spence If you were asked to suggest which real-life character was to be played by Woody Harrelson in his next…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster When I first heard about journalist Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman: A Country Doctor’s Story, which was later shortlisted for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize, I…
Reviewed by Rob Spence If you were tired of aimless flânerie in the Paris of the twenties, and fancied seeing Josephine Baker dancing at the Folies Bergère, you might be…
