Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is best known for his graceful, lucid if not always practical book "The Compleat Angler". It has stayed in print since it first appeared in 1653. More than just a writer of devout pastoral, Walton is one of the fathers of mo...

The novella and conto, short forms that lend themselves to satire, social comment and the lyric impulse, are at the heart of Portuguese fiction. We can trace the history of the nation and of the Portuguese imagination in these vivid stories. "Profes...

"The Anarchist Banker", which starts in the nineteenth century, and the second volume, "Professor Pfiglzz and His Strange Companion", present English readers for the first time with a generous sampling of the best classic and new Portuguese writing....

The 501 quatrains of "Second Best Moments in Chinese History" make it seem at first like a repackaged version of Frank Kuppner's celebrated first collection "A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty" (1984). But it isn't: "Please note that this is a completely...

"Here is a portrait of the poet by his wife which has no equal, not even in Mary Shelley's sketches of her husband" – New Statesman Under Storm's Wing collects all that Helen Thomas (1877-1967) wrote about the poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917): the cel...

"The Selected Poems", James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from "The Lost Pilot" which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection "Reckon...

Afrika! is an imaginary space, a "k" and an exclamation mark away from the processes, histories and conflicts that this, Adam Schwartzman's second collection, takes for its subject. It is a space that is at once estranging and, with its wily appropri...

In an essay Louise Gluck says that every end of a book is for her a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off", in which she discerns the themes, habits and preoccupations of the previous volume as defining the tasks of the next. The First Five Boo...

Daylight evokes old loves, friendships and literary ghosts, and a lifetime in the battered landscape of this century. Elaine Feinstein has "a sureness of rhythm and tone, a caring sentience, a knack of truthfulness, and a feeling as of Russian poets...

"...so that Emma found, on being escorted and followed into the second carriage by Mr Elton, that the door was to be lawfully shut on them, and that they were to have a tete-a-tete drive..." But which Emma? Jane Austen's or Flaubert's? Christine Bro...