Edward Weech: The Man with the Golden Pun - Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb by Eric G Wilson | Continue reading
Hugh Haughton: Bloomsyear - Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland by John McCourt | Continue reading
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst: Visionary of Bromley - The Young H G Wells: Changing the World by Claire Tomalin | Continue reading
Iain Bamforth: Bach, Bombs & Books - A walk around a city reborn | Continue reading
Charles Darwent: The Artist Behind the Bowler Hat - Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev, with Sarah Whitfield | Continue reading
Allan Massie: A Convivial Chap Led Easily Astray - The Sins of G K Chesterton by Richard Ingrams | Continue reading
Charles Darwent: Virtuosos of the Asylum - The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Art and Hitler’s First Mass-Murder Programme by Charlie English | Continue reading
Fergus Butler-Gallie: Fornicating Under Consent of King - Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter – Then, Now, and Forever by John McWhorter | Continue reading
John Adamson: Night of the Guillotine - The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris by Colin Jones | Continue reading
Julian Baggini: #MeatToo - How to Love Animals in a Human-Shaped World by Henry Mance | Continue reading
Jonathan Meades: Et Tu, Brute? - Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder by Michael Burleigh | Continue reading
Judith Hawley: Mary, Quite Contrary - Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics by Sylvana Tomaselli | Continue reading
Paul Broks: Changes of Mind - The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen | Continue reading
Dmitri Levitin: Masters of None? - The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag by Peter Burke | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes: Hooked on a Feline - Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat by Oliver Soden; Lost Cat by Mary Gaitskill; Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray | Continue reading
Anthony Cummins: A Brush with the Goncourts - On the brothers behind the prize | Continue reading
Lucy Lethbridge: The Woolworths Poltergeist - The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story from 1930s England by Kate Summerscale | Continue reading
Robin Simon: He Painted It Black - Goya: A Portrait of the Artist by Janis A Tomlinson | Continue reading
Jeremy Treglown: The Long Road to Leopoldstadt - Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee | Continue reading
Timothy W Ryback: Bonfires of Reason - Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack by Richard Ovenden | Continue reading
Patricia T O'Conner: Tawk of the Town - You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English by E J White | Continue reading
Will Wiles: Deceptively Bright, in an Up & Coming Area - Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett | Continue reading
Alastair Morgan: Alastair Morgan talks to Anthony Burgess | Continue reading
James Purdon: Rooms with a View - Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride | Continue reading
Kevin Jackson: Daffodils & Telephone Directories - Yellow: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau (Translated from French by Jody Gladding) | Continue reading
Paul Theroux: Born in the USA | Continue reading
Catherine Fletcher: On His Holiness’s Service - Michelangelo, God’s Architect by William E Wallace | Continue reading
Donald Rayfield: Pride, Prejudice & Pushkin - Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor by Vladimir Nabokov (Edited by Brian Boyd & Anastasia Tolstoy) | Continue reading
Martin Bell: An Uncommon Correspondent - Mr Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima by Jeremy Treglown | Continue reading
A J Lees: What’s in the 7 Up? - Lithium: A Doctor, a Drug, and a Breakthrough by Walter A Brown | Continue reading
Richard Davenport-Hines: Shoulders Have I Rubbed - The Glossy Years: Magazines, Museums and Selective Memoirs by Nicholas Coleridge | Continue reading
Helen Rappaport: Victoria’s Angel - Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy by A N Wilson | Continue reading
Donald Rayfield: Artists & Lovers - The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture by Orlando Figes | Continue reading
Adam Douglas: Me, My Shelf & I - Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell | Continue reading
Costica Bradatan: It Began in a Manger… - Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland | Continue reading
Richard Carwardine: Emancipation and Beyond - Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W Blight | Continue reading
Helen Pearson: Where Does It All Go? - What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research by Jonathan Gershuny & Oriel Sullivan | Continue reading
James Delbourgo: From Here to Infinity - Splash: The Art of the Swimming Pool by Annie Kelly (Photography by Tim Street-Porter); The Swimming Pool in Photography by Francis Hodgson (ed) | Continue reading
Lucy Lethbridge: Mistress of Disguise - The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective: Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime by Susannah Stapleton | Continue reading
Nicholas Roe: The Pen & the Spade - The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels by Adam Nicolson | Continue reading
Alwyn W Turner: In the Shadow of Big Brother - In the Shadow of Big Brother by Dorian Lynskey | Continue reading
William Whyte: A Cheat Dog-Collared - The Professor & the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit & Defrocking by Adam Sisman | Continue reading
Clare Bucknell: Thinkers & Drinkers - The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch | Continue reading
Peter Marshall: Too Female to Rule? - Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior by Catherine Hanley | Continue reading
Dmitri Levitin: Going for Gold - Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s ‘Secret Fire’ by William R Newman | Continue reading
‘A dragon is no idle fancy,’ wrote Tolkien in 1936, but ‘a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold’. The potency has only increased over the last eighty years. Dragons crowd the pages of modern fantasy; no one needs telling that Dae … | Continue reading
One evening in late 1908, Henri Matisse introduced a short, dapper visitor to the community of often struggling artists who tended to congregate at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. Picasso was there, as was his iconoclastic painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, then still known by … | Continue reading
Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of Samuel Johnson’s conversation in Boswell’s biography and know at once that he was … | Continue reading